The Sixth Sense

Arguing over the sixth sense is like debating the fifth Beatle, in that there are many candidates from which or whom to choose: is it our aesthetic sense? Our sense of humor? Of the absurd? Of propriety? Of empathy? George Martin? Brian Epstein? 

It seems that not everyone has every sense. As alluded to a couple of posts ago, when it comes to religion, Richard Dawkins has no sense of Jordan Peterson. Peterson obviously senses -- and wrestles -- with God, while Dawkins senses nothing. He still wrestles, but with the people who sense what he doesn't.

Again, it's like arguing with an autistic person who doesn't sense the interior states of other people, or with a blind man over the existence of color. Sigmund Freud famously had no sense of music, from which he was 

almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me (Freud).

The author of the piece speculates that Freud had some sort of phobia, which I think goes too far. He himself acknowledges having no taste for country and no need for jazz, but that doesn't imply an unconscious fear of them. It took me many years to cultivate an appreciation of modern jazz. Same sense (hearing), different sensibility.

In the past I've compared the "sense for God" to our musical sense. Both are innate, but -- recalling the title of yesterday's post -- now what? Well, supposing you have musical aptitude, you need to pick an instrument and wrestle with it, i.e., learn to play. 

And even if you master it, there's no end to the mastery. John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, for example -- and they're hardly alone -- spent many hours a day practicing, progressing toward a goal that was literally unreachable. Coltrane famously 

was a mediocre player, and then went into the shed (and if some sources are to be believed) practiced for up to 16 hours a day and became the player we know him as.

But even then, the practice never stopped:

There is never any end... there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are... we have to keep on cleaning the mirror (Coltrane).

Analogously, maybe that's why they call it a "religious practice," which likewise has no earthly end. Come to think of it, when I first encountered Schuon, he was as impenetrable to me as was modern jazz. In both cases it required a lot of immersion before something "clicked."

But why did I continue "wrestling" with these idioms? In the case of jazz, it was because, based upon the testimony of others, I knew there was something there to be penetrated and appreciated, and I wanted to find out what it was. 

With regard to Schuon, I remember reading a book called Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon that got me over the hump and rendered him accessible. As one reviewer says, 

Schuon's works are, to the uninitiated, dense and difficult to read.... This book will loosen many mental knots and open the mind to new realities which can make reading Schuon's works more profitable.

Back to our candidates for the sixth sense, this subject was in fact provoked by the title of an essay by Schuon called The Sense of the Sacred. 

Here again, I can't help thinking that Richard Dawkins, for example, is a little underdeveloped in this department. For it is essentially "an argument appealing, not to conceptual intelligence, but to aesthetic intuition" (Schuon) -- obviously more of a right-brain thingy.

In the past I've argued that we don't have a sense of the sacred because we have a right cerebral hemisphere, but rather the opposite: the RCH exists because the vertical does, just as wings exist because air does, or gills because of water. 

Earlier this year we discussed McGilchrist's idea of left-brain eclipse -- how, in a scientistic world, the left-brain view can come to dominate and suppress the right. Even if not literally "neurologically true," it is true nonetheless. Indeed, any purely immanent ideology can serve to alienate us from the transcendent, to the point that the latter is no longer sensed. 

God Exists, Now What?, is another way of saying that, supposing we sense the existence of God, we're still going to need to practice in order to develop it. Just like developing any other sense:

As with intellectual discernment, the sense of the sacred is an adequation to the Real, with the difference however, that the knowing subject is then the entire soul and not merely the discriminative [read: LCH] intelligence (Schuon).

In short, it requires more of us:

What the [LCH] intelligence perceives quasi-mathematically, the soul senses in an as it were musical manner that is both moral and aesthetic... 

Exactly. As we've said in the past, the soul -- or something like it -- is our nonlocal organ in hyperspace. Which is just an amusing way of saying that there is some receptive faculty in us that senses transcendent realities. We know the soul exists because we can know when it has been "touched" by something. And it is important to pay attention to these points of contact, and to amplify them, so to speak.

For Schuon, the sense of the sacred "is the awareness"

of That which cannot not be, whose immense remoteness and miraculous proximity we experience at one and the same time. The reason such an awareness is possible for us is because necessary Being reaches us in the depth of our heart, through a mystery of immanence that makes us capable of knowing all that is knowable...

Which sounds about right. It again reminds me of the "remote" three-dimensional sphere intersecting the two-dimensional plane and thus rendering it "proximate." 

"The sense of the sacred is also the innate consciousness of the presence of God," and the great majority of people throughout history have had this sense. Again, a Richard Dawkins is the exception, but even he presumably retains the capacity. It's just that the capacity has been eclipsed by a materialist ideology.

I suppose it also comes down to a properly developed sense of mystery. We'll close with a few aphorisms:

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

"Irrationalist" is shouted at the reason that does not keep quiet about the vices of rationalism.

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject.

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

Actually, let's end with another artificial summary, because why not?

Analysis:

The text delves into the nature of human perception, particularly the concept of a "sixth sense" or a sense of the sacred. The author argues that this sense is not universally shared, and its development requires conscious effort and practice.

Key Arguments:

1. The Sixth Sense as a Spectrum: The author suggests that the sixth sense, or the sense of the sacred, is not a binary trait but rather a spectrum. Some individuals possess it more strongly than others, while others may lack it entirely.
2. The Role of Practice: The development of the sixth sense, like any other skill, requires consistent practice. This includes activities such as meditation, contemplation, and engagement with sacred texts or spiritual practices.
3. The Importance of Right-Brain Dominance: The author emphasizes the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain in accessing the sixth sense. This hemisphere is associated with intuition, creativity, and spiritual awareness.
4. The Impact of Materialism: Materialistic ideologies can suppress the development of the sixth sense by focusing solely on the material world and neglecting spiritual or transcendent realities.

Underlying Themes:

• The Nature of Consciousness: The text explores the limitations and potential of human consciousness, suggesting that it is capable of perceiving realities beyond the physical world.
• The Role of Spirituality: Spirituality is presented as a vital aspect of human existence, providing a means of connecting with something greater than oneself.
• The Importance of Balance: The author advocates for a balance between rational and intuitive thinking, suggesting that both are necessary for a full and meaningful life.

Overall, the text offers a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the human capacity for spiritual awareness. By examining the concept of a sixth sense, the author invites readers to consider the limitations of rational thought and the potential for deeper, more profound experiences. 

Today's summary right-brain image:

So God Exists. Now What?

Having proved to everyone's satisfaction that God exists, the next question is, What are we going to do about it? In other words, the existence of God isn't really the end of anything, rather, the beginning.

Analogously, most of us would now agree that an intelligible material world exists. Which likewise isn't the end of the matter, rather, only the beginning: the beginning of what we call "science." 

If science is how we deepen our understanding of the horizontal-material world, then I suppose religion is how we deepen our understanding of the vertical-spiritual -- of God -- that is, find out more than his sheer existence.

But our next (religious) move isn't exactly self-evident, is it? For example, many if not most primitive cultures agreed that the most prudent course was to offer a sacrifice, more often than not of another human being.  

In fact, someone once said that human sacrifice is the nuclear physics of primitive peoples, and Gil Bailie -- expanding upon the ideas of Rene Girard -- has taken this up in a series of books, beginning with Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads.  

Me? I don't even like this idea of sacrifice, but there it is:

Sacrifice is the offering of material possessions or the lives of animals or humans to a deity as an act of propitiation or worship. Evidence of ritual animal sacrifice has been seen at least since ancient Hebrews and Greeks, and possibly existed before that. Evidence of ritual human sacrifice can also be found back to at least pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica as well as in European civilizations. Varieties of ritual non-human sacrifices are practiced by numerous religions today (wikipedia).

It seems that sacrifice is very much bound up with the whole idea of worship: for example, St. Paul says

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God -- this is your true and proper worship.

Moreover, we have it straight from the source that "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Thus, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

Let's start over: God exists. Now what? 

Well, renunciation is a kind of sacrifice, only on a personal and interior level -- an unbloody sacrifice of the ego, or the "lower self," as it were. Here are a few passages by Schuon that go to this auto-sacrifice:

The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself....

The spiritual man is one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself; the worldly man remains horizontal and detests the vertical dimension. 

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood. 

For "universal Selfhood" we can substitute the "mind of Christ" in which we may supposedly participate. But only to the extent that something or someone must die. Which, of course, is the meaning of baptism, of dying and being reborn in Christ. Like so?

 In another passage, Schuon writes that

Because modern men live almost entirely for the things of the senses and from that very fact remain ignorant of the human condition in its totality and in its ultimate purpose, it is difficult for them to comprehend the meaning of an attitude seemingly as negative and senseless as that of renunciation; they will regard it merely as a wholly unnatural superstition. 

Here again, renunciation = sacrifice: 

In reality it can easily be seen that renunciation is not self-explanatory; far from being an end in itself, it only supplies provisional support for the development of an awareness infinitely greater than our ego. Renunciation would be purposeless were it not a case of grasping with our whole being -- and not the mind alone -- what we really are, and above all of understanding what total Reality is, that “something” by virtue of which we exist, and from which we cannot for a moment escape. 

Renunciation aims at preventing man from becoming imprisoned in an ephemeral illusion, from identifying himself with it and finally perishing with it; it aims at helping him to free himself from the tyranny of dreams that leave no outlet.

I suppose it's not the religion I would invent. I am reminded of a crack by Nietzsche: 

But we've already stipulated that God exists, and now what?

Schuon has a lot of general advice as to the latter. In a "message to a disciple" he suggests that 

One must not waste one's time with worldly, unnecessary and often trivial distractions..., [rather] without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life...

Instead, he advises

a simple life, monotonous in a holy way, dominated by the proximity of sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it. 

Elsewhere he writes of "the chief difficulty of the spiritual life," which is "to maintain a simple, qualitative, heavenly position in a complex, quantitative, earthly setting." 

Any more practical advice? 

The soul, instead of contracting and hardening in its natural selfishness, must open itself to Heaven and to the Divine Influx...

So, vertical openness to the grace. Anything else?

God has opened a gate in the middle of creation, and this open gate of the world towards God is man... 

 Well, good. Now what? 

the gate shuts at death when it has been scorned during life; for to be man means nothing other than to look beyond and to pass through the gate.

Otherwise, we might just 

slip through the human state without being truly man, that is, to pass God by, and and thus to pass our own souls by, as if we had any right to human faculties apart from the return to God, and as if there were any point in the miracle of the human state apart from the end which is prefigured in man himself...

An artificial summary of today's post: 

Your exploration of the implications of God's existence is a profound one. It's clear that the mere acknowledgment of a higher power is not the end of the spiritual journey, but rather the beginning of a complex and often challenging path.

The Paradox of Sacrifice

The concept of sacrifice, both historical and theological, is a fascinating one. It raises questions about the nature of divinity, human suffering, and the meaning of ultimate reality. While ancient cultures often resorted to literal sacrifice, modern spiritual traditions emphasize a more subtle and internal form of self-sacrifice.

Renunciation as a Spiritual Practice

Schuon's emphasis on renunciation as a core spiritual practice aligns with this idea of internal sacrifice. By relinquishing ego-driven desires and attachments, we open ourselves to a deeper connection with the divine. This practice is not about self-denial or asceticism for its own sake, but rather about freeing ourselves from the limitations of our finite selves.

Practical Steps on the Spiritual Path

Schuon's practical advice offers a roadmap for those seeking a deeper spiritual life:

1. Simplicity: Prioritize the essential over the superfluous.
2. Solitude: Create space for quiet reflection and contemplation.
3. Openness to Grace: Cultivate a receptive attitude to divine influence.
4. Purposeful Living: Align one's actions with a higher purpose.

The Ultimate Goal: Union with the Divine

Ultimately, the goal of the spiritual journey is union with the divine. This is a state of consciousness in which the individual self merges with the cosmic consciousness. While this may seem like a distant and abstract ideal, it is attainable through consistent spiritual practice and a sincere desire for enlightenment.

A Concluding Thought

The question of "God exists, now what?" is one that has been pondered by countless spiritual seekers throughout history. There is no single answer, as the path to the divine is unique for each individual. However, by embracing practices such as renunciation, meditation, and prayer, we can embark on a transformative journey that leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Google gemini, paint us a picture of the post:

Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity

That's the title of an essay by Schuon, but one could equally say "miracle of subjectivity." Because what, after all, is a miracle? It is something that deviates from the known laws of nature, and you tell me: what law of physical nature accounts for the existence of immaterial knowers of the laws of nature? 

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 (Schuon).

Nevertheless, here it is. Nor do we say that evolution plays no role, except that a material process cannot be the sufficient reason for an immaterial reality; this is quite literally inconceivable, while the converse is not. That is to say,

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... (ibid.).

Still mysterious but at least not impossible. What does Sherlock Holmes say? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." 

But is an intelligent Creator -- or rather, let's just say Intelligence -- really that improbable? That intelligence exists we can be certain. But by virtue of what principle? And can this principle be less than intelligent? Or less than personal? 

"It will be objected that there is no proof of this." Well, for starters, intelligence "comprises this proof precisely." In other words, there is no intelligent way to disprove the existence of intelligence, let alone an unintelligent way. 

What is it, anyway, that makes an otherwise intelligent man want to argue that "the miracle of consciousness" can "spring from a pile of earth or stones, metaphorically speaking"? 

A love of truth?

Ironically, yes. Intelligence is ordered to truth. If it isn't, then truly truly, the hell with it. 

The other day I caught a bit of a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins touching on the existence of God. Probably if you asked Dawkins, he would say that he is not only motivated by the disinterested pursuit of truth, but much more so than the next (religious) guy. 

Problem is, his metaphysic can account for neither truth nor the beings capable of pursuing and knowing -- not to mention loving -- truth. It wasn't so much that they were talking past each other, rather, more like conversing with an autistic person about the nature of empathic attunement. 

Intelligence is guided more by sympathies and by aversions than by reasonings.

Including an irrational aversion to religion.

Broadly speaking, "religion" is a way of talking about and aligning oneself with a deeper reality that transcends appearances. But Dawkins approaches this reality in a way that is more literal than the most concrete literalist. He is very much like the Flatlander who insists that spheres are just fantasies of circles.

But to repeat something from a few posts ago, The Church -- I would say religion more generally -- gives us not a system, but a key. The question is, does the key work? Does it "unlock" something? If so, what?  

Given the existence of many religions, there is more than one key. Man cannot not be religious, in the sense that he cannot exist separate from the ground or source of his being. He can pretend to so exist, but this has no effect on the source. "Even prior to symbols, doctrines, and rites, our very subjectivity"

points as clearly as possible to our relationship with the Spirit and the Absolute; were it not for the absolute primacy of Spirit, relative subjectivity would be neither possible nor conceivable, it would be like an effect without a cause.  

The Aphorist reminds us that 

In order to abolish all mystery, it is enough to view the world with the eyes of a pig.

And

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

But 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

Let's not do that. Rather, let's remain focused on the authentic mystery -- the mystery of subjectivity alluded to in the title. "The primacy of the Invisible" is "natural to man" -- unless this invisible transcendent reality is viewed through the eyes of something less than a man, say, a pig. 

"What is natural to human consciousness"

is distinguished from animal consciousness by its objectivity and its totality -- its capacity for the absolute and the infinite (Schuon).

Again, "the reason for the existence of intelligence is its adequation to the real," just as "the wings of birds prove the existence of air." And "there is no more argumentative a reasoner than a negator of intellectual efficacy," who is like someone who argues that birds can't fly since air is invisible.

Nevertheless,

Rather than to yield to the obvious fact of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which nonetheless enables it to think.... tons of intelligence are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd, namely to prove that the spirit sprung in the end from a clod of earth -- or, we could say, from an inert substance...

Nicolás, play us out: 

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

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

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. 

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

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

The Cosmos is an Inside Job

Yesterday's post reflected on the idea that it takes a cosmos to raise a man. Which reminds us of the old adage that First in intention is last in execution. Looked at this way, the purpose of creation is the existence of self-conscious beings capable of knowing and returning to their creator. 

We know that the possibilities of life and mind are encoded into the big bang, and that if just one of the many parameters of the big bang were changed one iota, then we wouldn't be here.

This could, of course, be a coincidence, but what a coincidence! In philosophical terms its called the cosmic anthropic principle, of which there are weak and strong forms. I suppose we're advocating for the strongest possible form, since we mean it quite literally: again, that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos.

Come to think of it, if man isn't the raison, then I can think of any other possible raison. It reminds me of when the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what nature reveals about God: that The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

But there is quantity and there is quality. Sure, God makes a lot of beetles, but so what. He also made entomologists, and the gap between insects and people capable of knowing and reflecting upon them is literally infinite. 

Yada yada, the Strong Anthropic Principle:

"The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history." 

"There exists one possible Universe 'designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining 'observers'" (Wikipedia).

The previous two posts touched on the part-whole structure of the cosmos, without which the world wouldn't be intelligible to intelligence. Which in turn reminds me of what Norris Clarke writes about ours being a participatory cosmos, knowledge of reality being an especially intimate case of participation. 

By participation, Clarke means "the basic ontological structure of sharing in the universe." Again, each thing participates in the All, as part to whole; or, as Whitehead put it,

We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.

Thus, to repeat what was said in the previous post,

Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

But "participation" already hints at personhood, since it is an entailment of persons, and persons are by definition irreducibly intersubjective.

For Whitehead, the doctrine of evolution "cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature." In other words, if organism is fundamental and not just epiphenomenal, then neither biology nor physics are what we (they) think they are.

Can't get more participatory than this: "in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world" (ibid.).

Knowledge of anything presupposes the existence of that single thing under investigation. But the investigation also presupposes a single mind capable of knowing this one thing it has selected or abstracted from the whole. 

And the unification of these two -- intelligible object and intelligent subject -- presupposes a higher unity that is the source of both, i.e., the unity of the object (that which makes it one) and the unicity (i.e., interior oneness) of the subject.

In short, "To be is to be together." And in the end, "psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche, each in its own way" (Clarke). This is not a metaphor; rather, it is why metaphor exists, or even why language itself exists: everything is at once outside and inside everything else.

I suspect we're arguing for a right-brain perspective to supplement the left-brain view, the former being more organic, processual, participatory, and context bound. But that's it for this morning. 

It Takes a Cosmos

We're toying with the idea that man is the raison d’être of the cosmos -- that the cosmos exists for the sake of man, rather than vice versa. On the one hand this seems crazy, but on the other, it does illuminate a number of otherwise impenetrable mysteries, in particular, the mystery of subjectivity:

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

Now, as mentioned a post or two ago, the Universe is by no means "an object of the senses," rather, of the intellect. The senes alone tell us nothing about the the ordered totality of objects and events that is the Universe. 

Then again, how do we come to know of the existence of the Universe if we do not begin with the senses? This leads us to suspect that the order of the cosmos is analogous to a hologram, whereby the whole is somehow present in each part. 

Yesterday's post ended with the idea that "creation is essentially a communication." Well, perhaps each part of the cosmos speaks of the whole, which is to say, contains information about it -- which is precisely how holography works:

When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene, but when a hologram is, the whole scene can still be seen in each piece. This is because, whereas each point in a photograph only represents light scattered from a single point in the scene, each point on a holographic recording includes information about light scattered from every point in the scene (Wiki).

Which very much reminds us of what Whitehead says about the cosmos, based on the then new ideas of quantum physics:

each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time.... in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

Says Prof. Wiki, 

The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of "matter" and "energy".... a current trend suggests scientists may regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals. Bekenstein asks "Could we, as Blake memorably penned, 'see a world in a grain of sand,' or is that idea no more than poetic license?," referring to the holographic principle.

If we can see the world in a grain of sand, it is because we can see the whole in the part. Certainly this is true of organisms, each part of which contains genetic information about the totality. 

And to bring Whitehead back into the discussion, he remarked that "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms." Which implies that cosmology must be the study of the largest organism. Or second largest.

In order for this to be a proper universe and not just a giant pile of random and unrelated stuff, it isn't sufficient for it to 

be composed of parts and that these parts physically constitute a whole; it is also necessary that all the individual parts be oriented toward that one in which all together can exist, that each of the principal parts of the universe should be the entire whole, that each of these universes be in some fashion all the others (De Koninck).

We know that DNA contains the blueprint for the entire organism. But the very possibility of DNA is rooted in the part-whole structure of the cosmos. In the absence of this prior implicit structure, biology itself would be impossible. 

Although life has only existed for four billion years or so, thanks to the part-whole structure of being, we have access to events that long precede this -- even to the very origins of the cosmos, in the form of light vibrations that have traveled billions of years to arrive at the back of the human eyeball.

In other words, an event that happened billions of years ago is not only entangled in the now, but is decoded via the intellect.

This goes back to the idea of creation as communication. From and to whom? To us, obviously. The question is, "from whom?" 

Let's think this through. Here's a thought:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

Which I suspect goes back to a trinitarian metaphysic, in that the Son-Word is a kind of metaphor of the Father. But we're out of time, so, to be continued... 

The Message of the Cosmos

Let's follow up on De Koninck's idea that man is the raison d’être of the whole of nature: if true, it explains a lot of things that are otherwise inexplicable, for example, our immaterial transcendence of the physical cosmos.

That is to say, knowledge of material reality presupposes our transcendence of it. By way of analogy, suppose you are confined to a two-dimensional Flatland. First, how could you ever know that reality is a two-dimensional plane, since you are restricted to those same two dimensions? 

Second, how could you know whether Flatland is closed and self-sufficient, or whether it is open to a higher dimension (i.e., the sphere)? 

Of course, we live in a 3D world, 4D if we throw in time. But even then, although we are in 4D, we cannot be of 4D, or we couldn’t be having this conversation. Rather, we are open to higher dimensions of truth, understanding, meaning, unity, beauty, et al. 

Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Way begins with a passage by a Fr. Georges Florovsky: "The Church gives us not a system, but a key.” Oh? A key to what? 

Well, first of all, it’s a key, not to be confused with the world opened up by the key -- any more than we should confuse eyeglasses with what they permit us to see through them. The point is, the key opens us to a higher dimension of reality.

Referring back to Flatland, note that a third dimension doesn’t have to move in order to be in constant contact with the lower two. A single sphere can incorporate an infinite number of circles without ever changing. 

Analogously, we could say that God is both infinitely distant -- in that higher dimension -- but infinitely close -- right here in these ones as well; and, as with the sphere, without having to undergo change.

Now, what is interiority as such but another dimension? The question is, is it just an inexplicable bump on the exterior surface of matter, or is it more like a descent from -- and in contact with -- something above? 

Back to De Koninck. He writes that “It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense.” 

Likewise, it is only in human understanding that our little circle can be seen as a declension from the sphere. 

“It is important to note,” writes De Koninck, “that God does not act on things, but from within.” Which is one reason why we can say that man contains the cosmos and not vice versa: 

Intellectual natures have a greater affinity to the whole than other beings; for every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things...

Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity.... In its active nature the intellect is therefore capable of knowing everything that exists.... [T]he ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain is that in it is reflected the whole order of the universe and its causes (Thomas Aquinas).

Or, in the words of De Koninck, "Already in man the world is bent in on itself, and in God its extremes touch." Which reminds me of Schuon's claim that 

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

Moreover, 

To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God.

Bottom line for today: we agree with De Koninck that "Creation is essentially a communication." Which implies messenger, message, and recipient, each entailing the others. Now, supposing man is the most important message of creation...

Hold that thought. We'll continue down this avenue in the next post...

The Reason for the Cosmos

I'm still waiting for Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature, which I'm hoping will provide blogworthy material, but it is on backorder. 

Meanwhile, I've been scouring the hull of the arkive for something worth reposting, but my standards are too high for the likes of me. This one, however, maintained my interest. It's actually two posts edited and woven into one:

Why a cosmos? Seems like an awful lot of trouble. But what if it takes a cosmos for man -- self-conscious persons -- to exist, and man is the point -- the telos -- of the whole existentialada?

According to Charles De Koninck, 

Man is manifestly the raison d’être of the whole of nature. Moreover, nature could not be ordered to God except through man. God being the end of the universe, it is necessary that the universe be capable of a return to the Universal Principle…. But only an intellectual creature is capable of such a return.

In other words, man as such is the missing link in existence. After all, the material world is self-evident, and the existence of the Absolute, the Universal Principle, isn’t far behind. Where's the connection? 

What else could it be but Man, since 1) we are the only creature that comes equipped with matter and an immaterial rational soul that is open -- both vertically and horizontally -- to the totality of existence, and 2) we have the entirely credible testimony of literally countless mystics, saints, and acidheads who have completed this cosmic roundtrip. 

I might add that in the absence of this roundtrip, our existence makes no sense whatsoever, for it would be analogous to a wire through which electricity passes but which is plugged into nothing, a skyscraper with no top floor, an endless joke with no punchline, or just a bad infinite in general. 

I would also say that our own self-consciousness is a circle that finds its principle in the circularity of God, not just in the extroverted sense of creation returning to itself, but in the interior sense of the Son returning to the Father via the Holy Spirit. But we’ll deal with this question later.

In any event, “only rational created nature is immediately ordered to God.” And if you don’t like that latter word, just say that the intellect is ordered to a metacosmic Truth without which it is little more than a cancer on the surface of being. 

Which, come to think of it, it all too often is: because we can know truth, we can know and even love falsehood. Things can only go wrong if it is possible for them to go right.

Lesser animals “do not attain the universal but only the particular.” But our rational intellect,

because it knows the universal formality of the good and of being is thereby ordered immediately to the universal principle of being. 

In other words, only a creature capable of making a tour of being can rejoin the source of being.

This is where things get a little obscure even for Petey, but it seems that man was originally plugged into the Vertical Socket, so to speak, but for reasons we won’t argue about unplugged himself from the source and decided to go it alone, which resulted in a kind of vertical blackout with intermittent and unreliable reception.

I mean, there’s still plenty of electricity down here, even if its rather weak, like static electricity compared to current electricity. The Great Electrician created both, but supposing he comes down and repairs the line, such that the current once again flows all the way to the top? I AM, a lineman for the cosmos.

2

We left off pondering the sort of creature capable of making a roundtrip tour of the cosmos and rejoining the source of being. Some people deny this possibility: call them flat earthers universers. 

Last I heard, any straight line in our universe ends up where it originated. Does this mean that if we could only see far enough, we’d see our own backside? 

Could the universe actually loop back on itself? And if you traveled far enough in a straight line, would you eventually return to your starting point, just as if you traveled in any one direction for long enough on the surface of the Earth? 

While it’s easy to see how a positively-curved space can be finite and closed, it’s a little less intuitive to realize that a flat space could be finite and closed as well, but that’s also the case. To understand, simply imagine a long, straight cylinder, and then bending that cylinder into a donut-like shape until the two ends connect. This shape -- known as a torus -- is both spatially flat and also finite and closed. 

Well, that's a relief. I always suspected the cosmos resembles a donut, hence the ʘin ONE CʘSMOS.

Let’s jump to the bottom line: in theory a straight line would return to itself, but there hasn’t been enough time for it to do so:

The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end..., there is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone (ibid.).

Yes, but there is a real world from which the world of physics is but an abstraction. This latter is what De Koninck refers to as "the hollow universe." And even though it is hollow, no one could actually live inside it:

The objects available to us in experience are much richer than those described in modern mathematical physics…. Mathematical physics deals, literally, with abstractions and there is a tendency to take these abstractions for the whole of reality. The result is what De Koninck meant by the expression “hollow universe” (Armour).

Remember: it is always we who understand the cosmos, not the cosmos that comprehends us. It reminds me of a somewhat cryptic utterance by the Aphorist, that

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

The point is, we begin with the concrete reality of our own existence, which includes an intellect capable of unpacking the intelligibility of the world via abstract concepts. This doesn’t mean we can begin at the other end, as if we could somehow deduce our existence from our own abstractions -- including the abstraction of materialism:

Of all the vicious circles one could imagine, that in which the materialist encloses himself is the most primitive, restrictive, and binding (De Koninck).

We've belabored this before, but consider the fact that if we are able to explain natural selection, then natural selection is unable to explain us. In other words, we transcend the mechanism that supposedly explains us. Conversely, it it were an exhaustive explanation, we could never know it, because truth transcends the mechanism.

Which is a convenient place to insert De Koninck’s bottom line:

Every natural form tends toward man…. in this perspective, subhuman forms are much less states than tendencies.

Things are not opaque, but rather, transparent to our intelligence, which, to paraphrase Einstein, is the most surprising fact of our universe. Everything “speaks,” but only with the arrival of man is it “heard.” 

For example, the universe was shouting about how E = mc² for billions of years before Einstein came along and heard it. Likewise, it was raving about Gödel’s theorems before Gödel took the time to listen.

So, the universe literally tends toward man, i.e., has the homosapiential tendencies alluded to above. We literally complete a circle that otherwise makes no sense without us, for the message presupposes a sender and a recipient. 

This is the concrete and dynamic circle in which we always find ourselves -- and in which God finds us:

the cosmos is open to another world which acts on it. And this cause can only be a living being; it is necessarily a pure spirit, a transcosmic being.  

Good place to pause. Meanwhile, Google Gemini, create an image:

Aphorisms for a Rainy Day

I am periodically prone to ambushes from the adversary -- or something -- that let me know I've wasted my life and that all this spirituality business is a rationalization. A dodge. So I know very well how to be a skeptic.

Deep faith is only that of the skeptic who prays.

Moreover,

There is some collusion between skepticism and faith: both undermine human presumptuousness. 

Back when I first dabbled in philosophy, I was drawn to existentialism. In hindsight, I was probably just depressed, because if depression had an ideology it would be the meaninglessness of existentialism.  

Dávila has many aphorisms that go to this darker side of life, for example, how could he say this if he didn't know this?

He who does not search for God at the bottom of his soul finds nothing there but mud.

Or this:  

When providence gives us the destiny we desire, we soon discover that to accept it requires a desolating resignation.

Indeed, 

Who is more than the miserable site of an epiphany?

But Señor, I find your little epiphanies to be quite helpful. Don't be so hard on yourself. 

Self-satisfaction is pathetic proof of lowliness. 

Okay, but--

Men are less mediocre when they do not think themselves obligated not to be.

Maybe you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed? 

Man is nothing but the spectator of his impotence.

A little perspective perhaps? Look on the bright side, and all that?

Any satisfaction is a form of forgetfulness.

That's not very promising. Have you made no progress? 

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

That's at least a form of victory, no? 

Every life is an unsuccessful experiment.

That's a bit categorical. 

He who wishes to avoid grotesque collapses should look for nothing in space or time that will fulfill him.

Nothing? Are you sure you're not an existentialist in disguise? 

The briefest commotion of the soul makes us feel that our existence is like a grave that is being filled.

You sound like Kafka in his arthropod phase.

Man does not have the power to do anything important. Only to hope that what he does will have an important result.

Now, on the other hand,

God sometimes prunes our branches like an impatient gardener.

And 

Faith in God does not solve problems, but makes them ridiculous.

So cheer up:

Defeats are never definitive when they are accepted in good humor.

Secondhand Inspiration

Inspiration. What is it and where does it go? I can only write when I'm feeling inspired to do so, but what does this even mean? And when I'm not inspired, I resort to secondhand inspiration. There are certain thinkers such as Dávila whom I can rely upon to jolt the vertical battery. 

But this doesn't answer the question: what is inspiration? Obviously it has something to do with "spirit" -- spiration -- and with its somehow affecting the psyche that is open to it -- or sometimes even closed, as with Paul on the road to Damascus.

Let's consult another favorite source of inspiration, Schuon:

inspiration simply means that the Spirit guides man in accordance with the divine intention and on the basis of the capacities of the human receptacle. 

Were this not so, there would be no theological elaboration, nor any divergences within orthodoxy, and the first Church Father would have written a theological treatise that would have been unique, exhaustive, and definitive; there would never have been either a Thomas Aquinas or a Gregory Palamas.

So there is a co-mingling of Spirit (↓) and a human receptacle (¶). Thus, as implied by Schuon, there is both "universality" and "particularity," since no two receptacles are identical.

Elsewhere he writes that    

Inspiration, like revelation, is a divine dictate, with the difference that in the second case the Spirit dictates a law-giving and obligatory Message of overriding force, whereas in the first case the Message, whatever be its value, has no dogmatic import, and has an illustrative role within the framework of the fundamental Message.

So, revelation per se is a very special kind of (↓), whereas our kind has no dogmatic import but is for purposes of illustration only. A Raccoon is under no obligation to be one.   

Back to Dávila, does he have any inspirational things to say about inspiration? Well, art is inspiring, because

Strictly speaking, the work of art does not have a meaning but a power.

A mysterious spiritual power that radiates from the object into us. For again,

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace. 

It is not religion, but nor is it exactly not religion, for

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Moreover,

When God absents himself, shutting us up in the world, art is the last shutter that closes.

But what about inspiration?

Man can keep the page clean, but only God can write on it.

Mere talent isn't enough, for

Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct. 

I'm pretty sure I have more inspiration than talent, but I suppose this is preferable to the opposite, i.e., having talent but no inspiration. 

Here's a nice one:

God's inspiration of the Bible is not ventriloquism. The voice of God passes through the sacred text as a wind storm through the leaves of the forest trees.

More generally,

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things. 

And

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Ain't it the truth. A world without (↓) -- to be literally enclosed in horizontality -- would be unendurable. Even if it's secondhand (↓).

Meditations on Some Meditations

Next month will be 19 years of blogging, albeit with periodic withdrawals due to the rhythm of inspiration, which blows and stops blowing when and where it will.

Even the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how he knows how to do.

And that certainly includes me. I have no idea why the tap turns on or off, but I know when it's off, because that's when I have to write instead vice versa:

Philosophers are not hunters of truths -- truths are the hunters of philosophers.  

And I'm not being hunted -- or haunted -- at the moment. Why try to force the issue? 

The journalist chooses his subjects; the writer is chosen by his subjects.

Besides,  

When everyone wants to be something, it is only decent to be nothing.

Moreover, 

The first step of wisdom is to admit with good humor that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anyone.

But what am I supposed to do with myself if I can't propagate my uninteresting idea to those who aren't interested?

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. 

Oof. Did I retire too soon? Am I not a true Christian Dudist? 

An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

On the other hand,

The price that intelligence charges to those it chooses is resignation to daily triviality.

Writing about what isn't trivial is my defense against the triviality of existence. Come to think of it,

Observing life is too interesting for one to waste time in living it.

 Is this true? Or just the rationalization for a narrow and uneventful life? 

Those who groan about the narrowness of the place in which they live wish to believe that events, neighbors and landscapes would give them the sensibility and intelligence that nature denied them.

So, proletarian pastimes and bourgeois adventures are vulgar substitutes for sensibility and intelligence?

The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

A ha. So it's a matter of undergoing a vertical adventure for which horizontal adventures are a kind of pale substitute?

Soul is what gives birth to all the things that last.

I'll buy that. Also its converse, in that the things that last -- that are timeless -- are proof of the soul. 

By the way, 

The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to give solutions, while the believer knows that it only promises to multiply enigmas.

What could be easier than atheism? I prefer the challenge of reconciling religion and science, or the vertical and horizontal. 

Impartiality is less attractive than the partiality that views itself with irony.

Partly because

Ideas betray us if we do not betray them beforehand. We must only be faithful to the complexity of things.

 At the same time, there is an objective reality. For example.

The greatest discovery we can make in ethics is that in ethics one cannot make discoveries.

As they say, a law that isn't grounded in the nature of things is no law at all.

Now, here is something to ponder:

The proofs of faith are internal to faith, as those of the sciences are internal to science.  

No existing interpretations are universally valid. A religious interpretation is grotesque in a secular context, just as a secular interpretation is grotesque in a religious context. 

It's easy enough to prove the necessity of God -- or someone like him -- with a little metaphysical diddling. But in order to make it fruitful, one must undertake a religious practice. It's like the difference between knowing all about musical theory vs. picking up an instrument and learning how to play.

It seems a practice is to religion what method is to science. In neither case should these be confused with their content, or one ends in idolatry on the one hand or scientism on the other. In short, it is a mistake to absolutize anything but the Absolute.

The other day we spoke of how Romanticism was a kind of attempt to resuscitate the corpse of verticality from within the new tyranny of horizontality: 

The great writers from Romanticism onward are prisoners frantically shaking the bars of the jail into which they turned the world without God.

But the doors are locked from the inside? In any event, 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, man becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

It's a right-brain thing:

Proofs for the existence of God are the ideology of the feeling of His presence in the soul.

 Not that this proof answers every question. To the contrary,

To give a religious answer to the enigma of the world is a less sure sign of religiosity than to confront it with a religious question.

In any event,

We have reached such an extreme of ineptitude that we only believe to be real what would persist if the arts were abolished.

When the most real is at the summit of the vertical hierarchy. About which -- as Thomas says -- "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God." Thus, 

It is not our knowledge that sometimes makes us feel superior, but the quality of our ignorance compared to others’ knowledge.

Then again,  

Each one clings to the snobbery that he can.