Son of God? Tell it to the Pagans!

A brief aside before we proceed into the meat of the post.

One of the obvious tensions in early Christology resulted from the fact that these were Jews, even devout ones. "Christian" was not a self-designation, but a Roman epithet for these eccentric and annoying meshugeners.

True, they were messianic Jews -- but that can be said of all Jews, since being a Jew means being always on the lookout for his appearance. The problem was that the résumé of this particular candidate in no way met expectations. More problematically, there was nothing in existing Judaism permitting the messiah -- or any other man, for that matter -- to be the "son of God." Judaism is not some kind of pagan fertility cult.

Remember, these were strict monotheists. There was nothing kosher, to put it mildly, about the idea of God being a man, becoming a man, or appearing in the form of a man: Er, no. We don't do that. That is for the superstitious Romans who make up silly stories and pretend their Caesars are gods.

Which is perhaps why the story generally went down easier with the goyim, but often at the expense of distorting it with a pagan, not Jewish, mentality. Many of the heresies that had to be struck down over the centuries were a result of thought that was not properly Christian -- which was in the process of development -- and certainly not Jewish, but rather, pagan. No different from today.

In fact, I had this very conversation with a Jewish relative a couple of months ago, who said she had no difficulty with the idea of Jesus as a prophet or moral teacher, but that the second commandment was an insurmountable obstacle to ever regarding him as God. Can't go there. Monotheism is monotheism, and idolatry is idolatry.

She is, of course, correct. Except that she has erected a false dichotomy of Jewish-pagan, rather than the complementarity, or organicity, of Jewish-Christian. This is in no way to imply that she should abandon Judaism, only to say that in order to understand Christianity, one must look at it through its own categories (some of which address precisely the issues she raises).

Ironically, the reality, in our opinion, only adds to the credibility of the gospels, since only a rather inattentive or frankly oblivious Jew would try to convince other Jews with a tall tale calculated to repel them. While you're at it, might as well say the messiah is a bacon-loving polygamist who sacrifices children to Ba'al. If you're going to make something up, why not at least make it plausible -- or even just palatable -- to your audience?

But as we were discussing yesterday, this is precisely why it took hundreds of years to sort this all out, and to square monotheism with the circle of trinitarianism -- which is obviously not tri-theism, God forbid!

The ultimate result was a delicate balance that preserves a strict monotheism while allowing the Incarnation. Just the fact that it took so long to fine-tune this theology shows how seriously these early theologians took the connection to Judaism.

On to the main program. I'm going to skip straight to the part of the book that most caught my attention and made my eyes bug out of my head, carom off the page, and shoot back into their sockets. I should point out that I haven't yet thought about the implications. I just knew that there were some implications, and that the passage would make for good blogfodder. I put my mind "on hold" until I could post about it, so the bobservations could be freshly half-baked, as usual.

Schönborn reviews Karl Rahner's attempt to grapple with the question of what Jesus' mentality must have been like. Is there any earthly analogue that allows us to at least imagine what it must have been like? After all, it is said that he was "true man." That being the case, how can this be reconciled with being "true God"?

In practical, everyday terms, what is it like to have "two natures"? Does this mean he's conflicted, like any other neurotic with competing agendas? Does the man know what the God is up to? If so, then what's the big deal about the Passion? Doesn't he know it will all turn out well in the end? Isn't he omniscient?

These might seem like silly questions, but they were precisely the sort of questions that have been asked since the beginning. You can just say, as many people do, that the questions are not susceptible to any rationalistic answers, and that it's just a mystery. Fine. But is this really a satisfactory answer?

More to the point, doesn't this create a huge barrier between us and Jesus, when there is supposed to be not just "companionship," but intimacy? How can one be intimate with someone whose mentality we cannot possibly understand? How may we approach someone who is so elevated, so brilliant, so lofty, that we are not worthy of him -- like the pagan godman Obama, who is barefootin' while the Dow burns?

Rahner's analysis of this question is quite "modern" -- and I mean that in a good way -- in that it takes advantage of just how much more we know about the mind than was known in "pre-critical" times (without tossing out what moderns have forgotten!).

For example, he begins with the critical idea that consciousness is never a kind of one-dimensional phenomenon. Rather, it is a "many-tiered structure" in which "at any given point in time man will consciously know some facts, but unconsciously know others" (emphasis mine).

And this doesn't just go for the "Freudian" or "pathological" unconscious, important though that may be. Rather, it would also apply to the scientific, cultural, historical, religious, and any other kind of unconscious -- which should really be called unConscious, since there is nothing "un" about it. Rather, it is quite conscious, only operating outside the realm of immediate ego-accessiblilty.

Think, for example, of one of our foundational thinkers, Michael Polanyi, and his theory of tacit knowledge. As science advances -- and in order for it to advance! -- more and more knowledge is assimilated and becomes "tacit." This knowledge -- or paradigm, really -- becomes an unConscious tool to discover new knowledge, similar to how a blind man uses a cane to probe his surroundings.

In so doing, the blind man is not consciously aware of the sensations in his hand, the only place where sensations are actually occurring. These sensations are instantaneously converted by the brain into a projected map of the space surrounding him. Indeed, if he should focus upon the hand -- the "explicit" knowledge -- then the world around him collapses and shrinks correspondingly.

If you want to know why the world of secular materialists and other flatlanders is so "small" and cramped, this is why. Like dogs, they sniff the finger pointing at the moon.

Note that any knowledge, any sensation, any thought, any conscious moment, must take place within a context of consciousness-as-such, a kind of space or sensorium for the play of thought.

And yet, can there be any kind of essential division between thinker and thought, between consciousness and its content? Or is it analogous to physical space, in which -- in a post-relativistic universe -- things are not just unproblematically in space but of it?

Grotstein calls this greater space the "background object of primary identification." It precedes us, in the sense that this is the intersubjective space we share not just with the m(O)ther, but with the cosmos -- and with all living beings. And unfortunately, things can go disastrously awry in the developmental journey from background object of primary identification to foreground subject of egoic identification, but that is the subject of a different post.

Only a "small" "part" of our consciousness is, or can be, of the self-reflexive variety, or present at any given moment. "Beyond that, there is a broad area of the subconscious, to which modern psychology devotes a great deal of research. Yet there is also a dimension, too much neglected by psychology, the 'superconscious,'" which is "a sphere of consciousness that is qualitatively different from the rational-objective consciousness" (Schönborn, emphasis mine).

Schönborn continues: "The superconscious [I would prefer "supra" conscious, or the more neutral "upper vertical"] is simply the constantly active spiritual dimension of the human soul, the original and life-giving source of any of its intellectual activity, [the] source of artistic 'inspirations' and of the great moral choices. Without being able itself to be the subject of discussion as such, the superconscious is the hidden source of every conscious activity of man" (ibid, emphasis mine).

Here I think Rahner has committed a subtle error that conflates the space of O with its content or structure -- like confusing the ocean and the fish who live there. But he is surely correct that, just as there is a constantly active unConscious, there is a ceaselessly active supraConscious -- even though, at the same time, there can be no ontological division between the two, owing to the intrinsic oneness of O.

And this leads straight to a way of understanding -- or at least imagining -- Jesus' mentality. For "The analogy with the superconscious allows us to form an idea of the simultaneous existence of two levels of consciousness, in which the upper level does not abolish the activity proper to the lower, but strengthens and guides it" (ibid.).

This is a good place to pause. To be continued....

Jesus, Christ?!

We've written many posts on the nature of the Absolute, on the Trinity, and about divinization and theosis from our side of the cosmic divide, but not so much about Jesus as a man.

After all, we are told that he is two natures in one person. It shouldn't be too difficult to understand the man per se, nor the divinity. But how do the two relate? In other words, it's one thing to say that he was a man, just like any other. Bueno. But when you throw in that he also happened to be God, doesn't this make the first statement a little problematical?

Well, doy!

By the way, before we proceed any further, I hope that what follows will be of interest to non-Christians. I should think that anyone interested in religion, or even just our humanness, or the foundations of western civilization, will find it provocative, even though I don't yet have any idea what I'm about to write.

At any rate, please bear in mind that this is from the perspective of an "outsider" -- or perhaps border-dweller at the edge of O -- or more to the point, an "explorer" who is surveying this intriguing landscape for the first time. Only an impertinent newcomer could ask such stupid questions. And whatever this post happens to be about, it feels important, and is eager to be written. So get on with it!

I also realize we're covering some very old ground here. But hey, it's new to me. In particular, the first few ecumenical councils between 325 and 680 were called in order to try to nail down this mystery, and to exclude various false formulations too numerous to mention. But few of the heresies that were repudiated along the way were exactly "stupid" or outright wrongheaded, let alone malicious. To this day, many Christians still embrace one or another, e.g., Assyrians and Coptics.

The majority of heresies were honest attempts to grapple with an issue that is not only difficult, but sui generis. In other words, there is nothing else to compare it to, plus, in reality, it's inconceivable anyway. This means that the early Fathers were essentially trying to achieve the impossible, to define with words what words cannot define.

In a very real sense, it was more of an apophatic than cataphatic endeavor, in the sense that the eventual formulation -- one person and two natures, without confusion and without division -- was designed so as to prevent traversing down certain fruitless avenues.

It reminds me of a map with clearly drawn boundaries around a completely mysterious center. Just because we know the boundaries, it doesn't mean we have any idea of what's going on within them. I know that Judaism has many similar boundaries that are designed not so much to disclose the mystery as to protect it.

But think for a moment how long it took to nail this bit of theological jello to the ecumenical wall. The first Council wasn't called for nearly 300 years after the death of Jesus. That's longer than the existence of the United States. It would be analogous to the Constitutional Convention still going on today, with different factions arguing over the meanings of "liberty" or "equality."

Which, of course, is still going on today, with the two factions as bitterly divided as ever. You might say that for constitutional conservatives, the left is a heresy. But for leftists who believe in a "living constitution," we are obviously the heretics and even terrorists.

In any event, the reason I've been thinking about this is because I've been reading Cardinal Schönborn's new work of Christology, God Sent His Son. This follows my usual highly disciplined pattern of reading whatever happens to fall into my hands, whether it is a cereal box or a work of metaphysical speculation.

Schönborn is apparently one of the cardinal's heavy hitters; among other things, he was editorial secretary of the catechism of the Catholic Church, and he obviously moves in the same theological circles as luminaries such as Balthasar and Ratzinger (although I don't find his writing to be nearly as exalted -- much more dry and scholarly).

Much of the book comes down to a somewhat tedious, if necessary, history lesson about this 2000 year long debate. Is there anything fresh that can be added to it? We have been given the fence. That's not going to change. But is there any new or better way to think about what's going on inside that fence?

In other words, I fully understand that certain things must be taken "on faith," not only because faith is a prelude to understanding, but also because minds much finer than ours have already thought this through, so that we don't have to reinvent the spiel each generation.

Nevertheless, I am not the sort of person who just wants to jettison everything we've learned about the world over the past two millennia. In fact, I don't happen to think that we should try to adapt our thought to premodern modes (nor could we anyway).

Rather -- and this is one of the mysteries and miracles of revelation -- I have discovered, to my surprise, that it is eminently possible to adapt revelation to whatever history happens to toss up, without in any way compromising the revelation.

This is indeed a mystery. Why should words uttered by some anonymous peasant 2000 years ago have any relevance whatsoever to contemporary human beings? No doubt most all of what was thought, said, and written back then is of no interest or relevance to us.

And yet, we have this fellow Jesus, whose words are still pored over for meaning which is too superabundant to be contained by any generation that has followed him. If nothing else, this argues for a very peculiar type of mentality. It's a little depressing when you think about it. Is anything you have said or written going to be debated in 2000 years? Will I still have cyberstalking trolls in 4011? I can only hope.

As Schönborn writes, "even if Jesus' period and his environment left their mark on him, it is still more true that he has left his mark on his, ours, and all other ages and on our whole world.... Only a unique and incomparable consciousness can be at the source of Christ's work of revelation and redemption" (emphasis mine).

What I would say is that there can be no effect without a cause. The effect of Jesus is clear enough. I don't think it can be gainsaid -- by believer and non-believer alike -- that he has been the most "efficacious" person in history, the most influential, impossible to ignore.

That being the case, what is the cause of this outrageous effect? Obviously the question is impossible to even approach in the absence of a framework that permits transnatural and nonlocal causation. The alternatives are just too banal to take seriously.

The most readily accessible information about Jesus is contained in the Gospels, but even -- or especially -- there, we are always confronted with a Mystery, which is again why it took hundreds of years to even place some kind of boundary around it. So let's dive into the Mystery, and see if we can't pull out a live one.

One of the purposes of theology is to facilitate thinking about -- or in -- God. Structurally speaking, this is no different than science or psychology, which provide us with models to think about what otherwise cannot be thought.

Thus, the question is not necessarily whether this or that scientific theory is "true" in the ultimate sense -- indeed, we know going in that no relativity can be absolute -- but whether it is fruitful, whether it answers questions, whether it pulls together diverse phenomena, and whether it generates new and deeper questions. This is how we should think about theology, not as absolute truth, but as a way to think about the Absolute in our relative sphere.

To be continued....

Wisdom is Not Autism and Life is Not Death

Anything that is knowable conceals the unknowable mystery of its own knowability.

In other words, even the merest scrap of knowledge always points in two directions, or has an interior and exterior horizon. As we ascend the hierarchy of being, this division of interior and exterior becomes increasingly apparent. When we look at another person, we always know that there is an interior hidden from us -- by which we do not mean blood and guts, but interiority per se. For just as there is a dark side of the moon, there must somewhere exist an infinitesimal bright side of the moonbat.

There are exceptions to this rule. Most conspicuously, severely autistic people do not have access to the human interior, resulting in a bizarre world of arbitrary and unpredictable "human furniture." But autism, like most forms of mental illness, runs along a continuum. We all know people who are reliably "clueless" about human reality. One of them is a frequent commenter here. You may know him by his impregnable head of solid rock.

Importantly, our first and most enduring orientation to the world is via this human interiority. We do not start off "autistic" and only then enter the human interior. Rather -- and this is obvious both personally and historically -- the interior precedes the exterior.

Only very gradually has mankind evolved so as to disentangle mind from matter, so to speak, and view the world scientifically, which is to say, objectively. Science provides knowledge of exteriors. But this hardly means that real reality consists of exteriors only. Insisting otherwise constitutes a metaphysical boo-boo that is fundamental, pervasive, and naive in the extreme.

In reality, there can be no real separation between the poles of fact and value, quantity and quality, knowledge and mystery, known and unKnown. Yes, there can certainly be a methodological separation between them, but the scientistic mind makes the elementary error of confusing method and ontology -- which is very much analogous to the absurd belief that there just so happen to be no fishes smaller than one's net.

A net pulls up creatures of a certain size, and no smaller. Likewise, Newtonian physics captures "facts" of a certain size, while quantum theory catches even smaller ones. But one would have to be slightly autistic or severely tenured to imagine that we're even close to catching everything in the ocean.

And this is leaving aside the fact that scientists are part of the selfsame ocean they are attempting to explain. Which is why anyone who fails to assimilate Gödel's theorems into his metaphysic is just like Mickey Mouse's cheating girlfriend, Minnie. That's right: she was fucking Goofy.

As was Gödel, but that doesn't mean his logic was unsound. Indeed, it probably required a maladjusted person -- someone external to the consensus reality -- to recognize the real one, or at least rule out the false ones.

At any rate, "this insight gives us the means to resist any division of 'value' and 'being' into two different spheres. Such a division, we recognize, is not only untenable but is nothing less than a mortal blow to the mystery of being" (Balthasar).

Again, we have no problem whatsoever with methodological dualism. If I should ever have open heart surgery, I'm cool with the idea that my surgeon looks at the heart as a blood pump. Conversely, I wouldn't want to see a psychologist who regards the brain as a thought pump.

In his The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas describes our primordial, interior relationship to the world. Given the fact that modernism exiles us from this interior world, while postmodernism imprisons us in a purely personal one, it is difficult to imagine the "enchanted" mentality of premodern man, when

"Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter, that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- and indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious" (Jonas).

Again, we begin -- both individually and historically, or psychologically and anthropologically -- with the interior. It could not have been otherwise, for the same reason that we don't start off autistic, and then begin to deduce the presence of the human interior by studying the parts of a face: "Let's see, the lip is upturned and the skin around the eyes is crinkled. This must mean Mother is happy. Whatever that is."

Please bear in mind that we would be the last to argue for some kind of Rousseau-ian reenchantment of nature. Ironically, this is what the scientistic types end up doing when they aren't busy disenchanting the world with their unreal abstractions. The latter activity -- unleavened by any spiritual sensibility -- results in an unreal, desiccated world, and therefore a longing for some kind of connection to primoridial reality, untouched by the chilled hand of scientism.

I'm pretty sure this is how one ends up with the retrograde paganism -- i.e., Gaia worship -- concealed in the climate changers. It's what happens when the religious instinct is denied, only to return in morbid form (which indeed occurs in virtually any kind of doctrinaire leftism). (And please recall that we do not necessarily deny "climate change." We just don't make a religion of it.)

Jonas notes that what we call a philosophical "problem" is in essence "the collision between a comprehensive view (be it hypothesis or belief) and a particular fact which will not fit into it."

Now, one way to deal with such problems is to deny the existence of any facts outside one's belief system. For example, for the left, it is impossible that other valid economic theories might exist, therefore, those of us who hold another theory are in actuality terrorists.

The psychologist in me would not minimize the feelings and perceptions of the left. Rather, if the left were my patient, the first thing I would do is acknowledge the psychic reality of the Terror. There is surely terror going on, but let's not jump to conclusions about where it is emanating from. Let's just sit with it for awhile, explore it, find out where it leads, what it is connected to in your psyche.

"You mean their psyche, right Doc?"

No, my dear Mr. (or Ms.) Leftist. Let's forget about them for awhile, at least for the hour we're here together. This time is for you. Let's just talk about you and your thoughts and feelings, and leave the world out of it for the time being. Let's pretend the world is a kind of canvas you paint upon, or a dream you dream."

Anyway, for premodern man, Death is the great riddle, the great exception to the rule of Life. But "modern thought, which began with the Renaissance, is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem" (ibid.).

As a result, "it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and the explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless.... That there is life at all, and how such a thing is possible in a world of mere matter, is now the problem posed to thought" (ibid.).

Again, bear in mind that we are not arguing for a romantic reversion to animism; rather, the orthoparadoxical Raccoon argument is for the transcendent position, i.e., the psychic Third that integrates the other two. As such, we also reject the philosophical stance of the dead and tenured, who insist upon a universal ontology which negates Life (to say nothing of Mind and Spirit) "by making it one of the possible variants of the lifeless" (ibid.) -- as if life is just a weird way of being dead.

You are, of course, free to believe this, so long as you refrain from treating others as lifeless objects to be manipulated by your wonderful policies.

But in believing this nonsense -- or onlysense, rather -- please understand what you are destroying. For "to reduce life to the lifeless is nothing else than to resolve the particular into the general, the complex into the simple, and the apparent exception into the accepted rule" (ibid).

This represents the polar opposite of what was elucidated in yesterday's post vis-a-vis the particular representing the ultimate, i.e., a person. Conversely, in the scientistic view, we only become truly ourselves when we are a corpse, no longer subject to this illusory hoax of nature called an "interior."

Thus, in the conclusion of Jonas, "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

The bottom lyin' is that one cannot be upside-down without rendering oneself inside-out.

Surfing the Future of Mankind

Let us recall how we washed up here, because I've lost track.

Let's see. We were riffing on the biography of John Paul II (to which we will return), but before long were rafting into a discussion of his theology of the body (to which we will return), before sailing over the horizon of Ratzinger's evolutionary cosmos (to which we will presently return), and then coming ashore with some of Balthasar's thoughts along the same lines, as outlined in his three volume Theo-Logic.

One point to bear in mind (as alluded to in yesterday's post) is that we cannot regard the cosmos as some sort of static or given fact, if only because its factuality hasn't yet fully disclosed itself. The world is always evolving, always coming-into-being; furthermore, "world and human existence belong necessarily to one another, so that neither a worldless man nor even a world without man seems thinkable" (Ratzinger).

No one disputes the first half of this equation, but few people outside the coonosphere even think about the second part, i.e., the impossibility of a world without man -- not necessarily Homo sapiens per se, but more generally, the necessity of a vertical "bridge" between Creator and creation in any manifestation deployed in space and time.

Even the most materialistic scientist knows that there is an intimate link between cosmos and anthropos, if only because all science depends upon the consummation and development of this intimate marriage of intelligence and intelligibility.

To put it another way, even the scientist presumably knows that science is impossible without scientists. In short, there must be a kind of anterior and posterior oneness beneath the explicit twoness (or complementarity) of cosmos and man, in the absence of which we couldn't explain anything.

Again, science advances via the reduction of multiplicity to unity. A single concept -- say, gravity -- draws together a host of phenomena, on both a micro and macro scale, that had seemed entirely separate. For Ratzinger, this "two-in-one structure" of man and cosmos "has always pointed to... unity as its final goal."

This being the case, it is incorrect to suggest that history is something that simply "happens" in the cosmos. Rather, "the cosmos is itself history. It does not merely form the scene of human history; before human history began, and later with it, cosmos is itself 'history.'" Ultimately, "there is only one single all-embracing world history, which for all the ups and downs, all the advances and setbacks that it exhibits, nevertheless has a general direction and goes 'forward'" (ibid.).

Now, this "one single all-embracing world history" is....

Take a guess!

Correct: it is the unifying theme of our book and of this blog, no matter how far we may seem to stray from the plot. We are always on the way to the place from which we never left, even if we never arrive there.

I remember an analogy used by Alan Watts. Imagine looking at a wooden fence with a hole in it. A cat walks by on the other side. Assuming no prior knowledge of cats, one would have no way of unifying the disparate phenomena appearing from our side of the hole. We would see an event play out in time, which is actually unified in a higher space.

We may apply the same idea to the cosmos, since we are in the analogous position of viewing its diverse phenomena through our finite and transitory existence on this side of the whole. As Ratzinger explains,

"Of course, to him who sees only a section of it, this piece, even though it may be relatively big, looks like a circling in the same spot. No direction is perceptible. It is only observed by him who begins to see the whole" (emphasis mine). (For example, even simplistic Darwinian evolution may only be seen by those transcending it; nothing less than man knows anything about it.)

In other words, the lower dimensional evolutionary "movement" of the cosmos can only be seen from a higher perspective -- one more reason why there can be no "naked facts," because the nature of any fact changes, depending upon the temporal and dimensional perspective.

For example, in this larger perspective, the "natural world" is not, and cannot be, some sort of abstract realm cut off from the totality of the cosmos. Rather, in an evolutionary, historical cosmos, "matter and its evolution form the prehistory of spirit or mind" (emphasis mine).

Here again, as explained in the book, it is nothing more than an unexamined prejudice -- a postmodern superstition of the tenured -- to attempt to pull the subject down into into the object, as if this provides any kind of satisfactory explanation for either.

This approach is analogous to attempting to pull the space of a building into its walls. One would have to be quite uncurious -- or a kind of craven conformist -- to accept it without at least raising one's hand in class and asking w-w-why?

One doesn't have to accept the Christian solution, but at least it confronts this question of an evolutionary cosmos head-on, without coming to a gentileman's agreement not to ask certain questions.

For if Jesus is who we think he is, then "the consummation of the world in that event could be explained as the conviction that our history is advancing to an 'omega' point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability that seems to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter."

Rather, "the real, firm ground is mind. Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality: it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist" (ibid., emphasis mine).

This is indeed one of our foundational orthoparadoxes, and quite literally the "connecting thread" of all our cosmic adventures. For without this connecting thread, there could be no connections and no threads at all. Regarded in this manner, what had looked merely "natural" is drawn up into a much more glorious narrative, i.e., the Adventure of Consciousness.

And not only. For this way of looking at things is, in a manner of speaking, the death of death, since the "dead world" of matter (or the world of dead matter) looks very different once life emerges from its dark womb.

But might we say the same of Mind? Is mind merely a dead end, a cosmic nul-de-slack, or does it point beyond itself to a higher source and destiny? Again, at least Christianity confronts and answers the question without changing the subject into an object:

"We have said before that nature and mind form one single history, which advances in such a way that mind emerges more and more clearly as the all-embracing element and thus anthropology and cosmology finally in actual fact coalesce.

"But this assertion of the increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center, for mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature, it subsists as individuality, as person."

Therefore, this "implies that the cosmos is moving toward a unification in the personal," and "confirms once again the infinite precedence of the individual over the universal.... The world is in motion toward unity in the person. The whole draws its meaning from the individual, not the other way about" (ibid., emphasis mine).

Thus the conclusion of Christianity, at once "scandalous" and yet fully in keeping with the way things Must Be: that a single individual, a fully integrated and complete Cross-Word puzzle, is "the center of history and of the whole.... What stands at the end is a countenance. The omega of the world is a 'you,' a person, an individual."

And this, by the way, has political implications, since this quintessential cosmo-historical Person "is at the same time the final denial of all collectivism.... The final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current, but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom." Terrorists indeed.



I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song
A child is the father of the man

(All of the quoted material is from Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity. Some introduction.)

The Story of the Cosmos in Three Words

Human beings are always up against it.

Against what? That's just it. We don't know what. Being that we're surrounded by It on all sides, it's surprising more people don't go nuts. However, there are actually many more nuts than one might suppose, once one realizes that much of what comes under the heading of "culture" -- and of human activity in general -- is just a giant defense against It. It is what happens while we're busy making other plans.

In last Friday's post, we were discussing how our natural reason is able to lead us to the threshold of the Creator, but no further (except perhaps in a very general sense). As Balthasar writes, the created mind may only come up against "the brink of the unfathomable mystery of the Creator's inmost essence." It is analogous to a vast mansion that we can see from the outside, but cannot enter.

And when we say "vast," that is putting it mildly, to put it it mildly. What we mean is that "vast" is a word we use to describe terrestrial space. It can only be a pale analogy as applied to the Creator, since he is "beyond vast," so to speak. Not only that, but it is a qualitatively different kind of space, in the same way that the "space" of the unconscious mind isn't really analogous to a big bag full of stuff.

In one sense, the cosmos may be thought of as a kind of "exteriorization" of the Creator's interior (bearing in mind that it by no means exhausts his interior, any more than a single work of art exhausts and completely discloses the genuine artist; God is not a "one-hit wonder").

As such, this big bong has an intrinsic "inside-outedness" which represents its intelligibility, precisely. To know something about anything is to understand something of its interior essence, which again proceeds in the direction of Interior --> exterior --> interior.

Thus, our own interior -- or mysterious subjective horizon -- is a kind of mirror image of the Creator's interior, so that his voice ultimately echoes in our being. To the extent that we hear Truth, it is always his Master's voice, i.e., the Interior daseiner.

This intrinsic interiority is also the irreducible source of mystery in the cosmos. Getting back to the question posed in the second paragraph above -- what is It? -- It is ultimately this di-polar, complementary mystery of interiority, with us at one end and God at the ether end.

However, this way of putting it is not mysterious enough for us. That is why we would prefer to further unsaturate it, and just say O <---> (¶). (See bʘʘk for additional self-tautologies.)

In an apocryphal story, Hemingway once bet someone that he could write a compelling short story in under ten words: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

Well, I bet I can symbolize the longest story ever told in under five symbols. Everything worth saying -- i.e., everything that is real, true, and efficacious -- is necessarily an instance of O <---> (¶). What about all that stuff that's not worth saying, knowing, learning, or repeating? That would be Ø <---> (-k).

Now, "because of this interiority, there are no naked facts" (Balthasar). I mean, right? It is amazing that this still needs to be said in the 21st century, but our detractors are always innocently coming at us with "facts," as if there is some fact somewhere that speaks for itself, with no mediation by a subject.

While we appreciate facts as much as the next guy, if there were such a thing as Naked Facts, they would be "exhaustively defined by their facticity; they would give no hint of any relation to a deeper meaning underlying them; they would have no 'significance' but their superficial meaning; because of their pure, flat factuality, they would be comprehensible in a single glance as independent, detachable units" (ibid.).

I remember having this conversation with a 20th century relative. I was trying to introduce him to the wonderful world of brilliant bloggers, but he insisted that he wanted his facts straight and unadorned by any agenda, as in the New York Times. To which I drew myself to my full height, looked him straight in the eye, and said: oh, never mind.

For where could one possibly even begin? Such a person is no longer up against It, but only up against a severely constrained imaginal world excreted by others: a pre-cogitated delusion, or second hand smoke blown up one's behind.

It reminds one of climate change models. When the climate changes in such a way that it doesn't conform to the models, instead of changing models, they attack the messenger. Everyone talks about the weather, but they finally do something about it: they politicize it. Indeed, "planetary temperature" is the perfect example of a "fact" that takes on vastly different meanings, depending upon the timeline one chooses. For example, where I live, if the temperature continues rising at the same rate it has the last hour, it will be 130˚ by midnight.

It is a fact that before we talk about this or that fact, we must account for the mysterious presence of facts-as-such.

For what is a fact? Whatever else it is, it assumes a cosmos in which "every being, every event, has significance, is laden with meaning, and is an expression and a sign pointing to something else" (emphasis mine). In short, we live in a cosmos in which everything is a symbol, which is exactly what we would expect to see in a logocentric reality. For the world is not made of atoms, or quantum waves, or of Whitheadian processes.

Rather, it is made of language: In the beginning is the Word. Or, in the words of Robert Wright, "In the beginning was, if not a word, at least a sequence of encoded information of some sort." But let's not quibble. It is the Word, which is intelligible because spoken, and vice versa.

So, to revert again to our opening question, human beings are always up against the mysterious Word. And this is true whether one is a Believer or a mere believer, because in either case, one must have faith that this Word discloses the Truth of things.

Come now. It is no less queer to suppose that this mysterious Word only conveys the truth of exteriors, because one still needs to account for the interior who comprehends them, which should -- if one thinks it through -- lead back to our little short story, O <---> (¶).

The crucial insight that springs organically from our discovery of the intimacy of being, then, is that the signifier can neither be perfectly united with nor truly separated from the signified. --Balthasar

(And in our opinion, this is because the world is irreducibly trinitarian, so that no fewer than three symbols are required to map and tell the story of its three coequal storeys, so to speak.)

When the Pupa is Ready, the Imago Appears

Another foundational rerun from several years ago, which follows up on some of the points discussed in last weekend's offering. Perhaps it's not a bad idea to rewordgitate some of these old posts, because it will give new pupas a chance to correct any buddhaflaws, while creating important gaps in their knowledge base: Coon mind, beginner's mind.

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As long as one clings to time, space, number and quantity, that person is on the wrong track and God is strange and far away. --Meister Eckhart

We couldn't be human if we didn't have something analogous to left and right cerebral hemispheres, with very different ways of processing information and understanding the world. As mentioned in last Sunday's post, I believe the reason we have a left and right brain is because we simultaneously mirror, and are mirrored by, the cosmos, which has both a horizontal and vertical structure.

Science deals with the horizontal aspects of the world. It is linear, deterministic, past-to-future, bottom-up, etc. It also presumes the logical atomism that seems to be "common sense" for the left brain. That is, the universe consists of an infinite number of parts which are external to one another and subject to various forces.

But the right brain isn't like this at all. Where the left brain is time oriented, the right brain sees things all at once. It is also inherently relational as opposed to atomistic. The right brain sees connections where the left brain sees divisions; it is continuous where the left brain is discontinuous. In a certain sense it is receptive and female, whereas the left brain is active and male.

I recognize that this is rather simplistic, but even if it is only "in a manner of speaking," there is nevertheless much truth to it, and confirming this truth is always just an experience away. For just as it is impossible to imagine a great poet, painter, or musician without a highly developed and integrated right brain, it is inconceivable that one could be a great theologian -- let alone saint or mystic -- without one.

We might also say that the left brain operates along the lines of asymmetrical (Aristotelian) logic, while the right brain is the realm of symmetrical logic. But no one -- unless they are brain damaged -- operates out of only one lobe, so there is always some degree of integration, although it can be relatively conscious and harmonious or unconscious and unharmonious.

For example, much of the bonehead philosophy that emanates from scientism comes either from unacknowledged sympathies emanating from the right brain, or a denial of its voice altogether. If it sounds half-witted, it is because it is.

It should be noted that in childhood the right brain develops in advance of the left, and that it has much deeper connections to the older parts of the brain such as the limbic system; as such, it is more "emotional," bearing in mind that emotions are also a sophisticated source of information, and that there can be both subtle and gross emotions (and even true and false ones -- for example, hating people who do not merit hatred).

As you may have noticed, much of spiritual development involves -- or is at least accompanied by -- a kind of "subtilization" of emotion, which is why it becomes more difficult for one to tolerate being around the Barbarians and other subspiritual riffraff.

For example, although the sacred and holy are just as real as, say, matter -- actually, more so -- they obviously cannot be detected only by the senses, but in the heart, so to speak. In turn, this is why for the left, nothing is sacred, except in an arbitrary or idiosyncratic way. They cluelessly steamroll over what is infinitely precious, like a child who gleefully smashes a cocoon to see what's inside. They habitually confuse blasphemy with courage. But aggression devoid of prudence is never courageous.

Now, one of the easiest ways to render scripture absurd is to approach it with the left brain of the scientistic mind. This is what anti-religious bigots typically do, with great self-satisfaction -- as if they are the first to have noticed that a literal reading of scripture is problematic! But if one approaches the same passages with bi-logic, the problem usually disappears.

For example, what can it possibly mean that "Christ is in me" and that "I am in Christ"? From the standpoint of conventional logic, this is patently absurd, like saying that "I am in Upper Tonga" and that "Upper Tonga is in me."

But from the standpoint of symmetrical logic, it not only makes perfect sense, but is a kind of logical corollary. We all know that God is both radically transcendent, or "beyond everything," and intensely immanent, or "within everything." With conventional logic, these statements would be mutually exclusive, but from the standpoint of symmetrical logic, they are complementary.

Speaking of complementarity, one wonders if some of the conundrums of physics cannot be reconciled in this manner. For example, from the standpoint of conventional logic, it is deeply problematic that the electron appears as either particle or wave, depending upon how one looks at it.

In other words, the same entity can either be an isolated part, or else a wave that shades off into the totality of existence. In the former sense, things are externally related and local, whereas in the latter sense they are internally related and nonlocal. This is a mystery to the left brain, but a banality to the right.

To extend the analogy a bit, much of the Bible is a primer on verticality (unlike a scientific text, which discloses horizontal knowledge in a horizontal mode). It simultaneously acquaints us with the vertical realm, while at the same time furnishing us with a vivid kind of language with which to think about and communicate it. This language was obviously quite effective for most of mankind's history. Indeed, it is perhaps difficult for modern sophisticates to understand how easily Christianity spread. People simply heard the story and said, "makes sense to me," and that was that.

But why did it make sense? The contemporary cynic will say that it had something to do with childlike naivete, or fear of death, or wishing to have a spurious sense of control over the environment. This may well have some truth in it, at least for the collective. But it is patently untrue if one reads the early fathers, whose thinking is enormously subtle and sophisticated, and is still completely relevant to moderns, to say the least.

In The Symmetry of God (a book which attempts to apply bi-logic to religion), Bomford notes that we cannot actually conceive of eternity, since it is both timeless and changeless, whereas linear thought naturally takes place in time. But we can grasp it through various analogies in the herebelow, for example, the "everlasting," which "provides the closest image of the timeless within time." Therefore, we gain a sense of timelessness in proximity to things that are very old, like a European cathedral, or the Pyramids, or Larry King -- anything "whose beginning is lost in the mists of time, the ancient and the ageless, for these approximate in feeling to the everlasting."

At the other extreme, we may also glimpse the eternal in the passing moment, "for such a thing is simultaneously whole and unchanging -- it has no time in which to change.... It is there in its fullness -- and it is gone again." Thus, a mystic such as William Blake could see eternity in a flower or grain of sand, just as Lileks can see it in an old matchbook or motel postcard.

Eternity can also be suggested "by the last event of a series." Bomford cites the example of an aging travel-writer "who had long before visited many places for the first time, and returned often, found a renewed significance in returning once more deliberately for the last time. Places regained the freshness of the first visit."

Similarly, "the last words of the dying may be seen as a key to an understanding of a whole life. The last of the series completes the picture, ends the story, and thus hints at the instantaneous wholeness of eternity."

Think "It is accomplished." What is? Oh, I don't know, maybe a little bridge between time and eternity in the heart of the cosmos, making each moment an eternal new year where death touches Life and the former is tranfsigured by the latter.

Every December 31, we touch the edge of eternity, as we approach the "end" of one year and the "beginning" of another -- the uniting of old and new, as they are joined at midnight. The Book of Revelation captures this quality, only on a cosmic scale, when the enthroned Christ "announces himself as The First and the Last and the Lord God himself is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end." Similarly, St. Augustine "addressed God as 'Thou Beauty, both so ancient and so new,'" an expression of eternity which has a deep unconscious resonance.

Traditional metaphysics always makes a distinction between the God-being and the God-beyond-being -- between the personal God that can be named and thought about and the Supreme Reality that is beyond name and form. The former is the cataphatic God about whom we may talk, debate and theologize in a somewhat linear way, while the latter is the apophatic God that so utterly transcends our categories that the most we can say about it is what it is not. Various formulations are "fingers pointing at the moon," and although they are doorways into the divine mystery, one should not mistake the finger for the moon.

Most rank-and-file religious people have never heard of the God-beyond-being, and might even be offended by the idea. They have a clear conception of what God is like, and don't want to be reminded that the real unconditioned God blows away those mental idols like something that blows really hard.

This distinction between the God-being and God-beyond-being is actually a distinction within God himself, and perhaps mirrors the distinction within us between symmetrical and asymmetrical logic. I don't believe it a bobmade principle, but rather, one that would be intrinsic to the inner life of the godhead. Indeed, it seems to me that the God-beyond-being is the one thing that absolutely cannot not be, although numerous implications immediately follow. God turns his face to man, but there's an awful lot going on behind a face!

This brings up an interesting point. That is, does God have mind parasites?

Well, "yes and no." For what is a mind parasite in the final analysis? It is a relativity that partakes of, and confuses itself with, absoluteness. God being God, he cannot help being present in all relativities. But being God, he cannot help being beyond them as well.

A mind parasite is a relativity that steals from the absolute and then forces itself upon others absolutely. In short it is a demon. Like everything else, it must ultimately be "of God," even though it can't be. Only symmetrical logic can reconcile this problem. Evil must needs be, but woe to the assoul who commits it!

The Freest Things in Life are Best

Returning to our cosmic ascent, the trajectory of this evolution proceeds from exterior to interior, and therefore from necessity -- or determinacy -- to freedom. At the toppermost of the poppermost is the absolute freedom of the Creator, or "man on the flaming pie."

It is the work of a moment to prove the existence of this Creator, for, as Balthasar notes, "every entity in the cosmos necessarily reveals" him.

That's the good news. The bad news is that this recognition of necessary being simultaneously "reveals the nonnecessity of creaturely existence."

D'oh! It seems that our only real choice is to be a meaningless fish in a meaningful pond (non-dual mysticism) or a meaningful fish in a meaningless pond (existentialism).

Again, as Balthasar explains, our own contingency "is a reliable trace by which created reason can see with necessity that the Creator exists." Nevertheless, one is generally blowing smoke if one speculates beyond this point about the specific nature of the Creator, in the absence of his own self-disclosure, i.e., revelation:

"The natural knowledge of God from creation inexorably comes to a halt before the intimacy of God's personal life." In order to proceed beyond this boundary, it will require "a new revelation of grace in order to open man in faith and to communicate to him -- in abiding mystery -- what God is in his inner being."

This follows a more general cosmic principle, that what is best, or highest, or most noble -- what is "worthier or weightier" -- is "surrounded by a protective veil that withdraws them, like something sacred, from the grasping hands of the profane."

You know, the Secret Protects Itself. One must prove oneself worthy of it, in the same way intimacy between two people is founded upon trust (which is another word for faith). Those who are faith-ful are trust-worthy, and vice versa.

Now, the cold and grasping hands of the tenured paw at existence like some kind of cheap whore, who will give up her secrets to any old lout. But the secret is not, and cannot be, revealed in this aggressive context.

For one thing, secrets are whispered, not announced to all and sundry, regardless of qualification. Thus, the ham-handed materialist "may confuse hiddenness with a deficient rationality or brand with irrationality all those objects that are not accessible to the anonymous, public knowledge of the man on the street."

Although we hold science itself in the highest regard, there is a certain scientistic mindset that is positively adolescent in its hubris.

I'm sure you know the type, for this is the person who not only fails to respect the mystery, but confidently speaks as if the mystery has been "solved." It is reminiscent of the insecure but obnoxious 18 year-old who boasts of his deep understanding of female nature. But enough about Bill Maher.

In the end, "All truth is rational, but not every intelligence is competent to know every truth." The corollary of this is that, the higher or deeper the world, the more qualifications are necessary. This is simply a truism. Someone even came up with a "10,000 hour rule," whereby it takes roughly this long -- equivalent to five years of full-time practice -- to master anything from golf to writing (and this assumes an underlying gift that can be cultivated; many people spend their lives cultivating the wrong gift).

I wonder how many hours, say, Richard Dawkins, has spent cultivating his interior understanding of the Creator? I don't mean to pull rank on anyone, for even -- or especially! -- so-called experts can be wrong (Bohr said that an expert is "A person that has made every possible mistake within his or her field"). But at least I've put in much more than the requisite 10,000 hours of spadework, so I've earned the right to be wrong.

For Balthasar, "mystery" and "interiority" are related terms. For what is a mystery but the palpable presence of an unKnown interior horizon? When we say "unKnown," we mean that it is not known rationally or externally, but instead, resonates in our being on a deeper level.

This too is surely a kind of knowledge, what Christopher Bollas calls the "unthought known." One reason (among many) that no artificial intelligence will ever be similar to our own being, is that humans are surrounded by the unthought known, without which we couldn't get through a single day. The world is not regarded as some sort of flat space, in which all facts are of equal significance and accessible in the same way.

Rather, the vast majority of our thinking takes place subconsciously, unconsciously, and supraconsciously. Think, for example, of what is going on when we view a film that moves us on some deeper level.

Again, a kind of re-cognition is taking place, regardless of whether we can explain it to ourselves. Even more mysteriously, what is really happening when we are moved by a piece of music? And would any merely rational explanation be worthy of, or replace, the experience? And do you really want this mystery to go away? Really?

More mysterious still is the phenomenon of "love at first sight." This is more or less how it was between me and Mrs. G.

To be perfectly accurate, it was "love at first date." Something simply clicked that night, and we ended up talking until the sun came up, with a kind of instantaneous intimacy I had never before experienced. What was that all about? Well, first of all, it's a mystery, moron! 27 years later, and this moron is no closer to explaining it, much less exhausting it. And suffice it to say, I do not want to ever "solve" this mystery.

The same is quintessentially true of religion, assuming that one has freely chosen it and not simply been compelled to follow it, as in the Islamic world. All those nerds of the radical Enlightenment assumed it would be just a matter of time before reason made it "unnecessary," but this failed to take into consideration the much deeper level of knowing that is being engaged in religious experience. Science, since it is always "public knowledge," simply cannot reach into these intimate spaces, any more than it can understand a relationship, or a poem, or a person.

Only a mind without feeling for nobility... will complain of this hiddenness of the best.

The Worstest Generation: Hope They Die Before I Get Old!

Sorry. I didn't intend for this to become a post. It was just a passing thought that kept going on and on until I ran out of time....

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On a completely unrelated topic, one of the most annoying things about the most self-regarding generation in human history -- the dreaded Baby Boomers -- is that they are constantly taking credit for things of which they played no part whatsoever. For example, at the time of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the oldest baby boomer would have turned just 18 that year, and couldn't even have voted until 1967. Indeed, a greater percentage of those old racist Republicans voted for it than did idealistic Democrats.

Those cool Boomers who discovered coolness are often seen as the generation that invented rock music, but this is clearly untrue. Rather, they are the ones who wrecked it for everyone else. The vast majority of the truly great rock artists are all pre-boomer. Obviously, the Founding Fathers were all born before 1946: Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, the Everlys, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, not to mention all the blues immortals: Muddy, Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker.

But the next generation of rockers -- the one most identified with, and idealized by, the Boomers -- was also pre-Boomer. Let's begin with the British Invasion. A short list of consensus all-time greats would include Lennon-McCartney (1940, 1942), Jagger-Richards (1943), Pete Townshend (1945), Ray Davies (1944), and Van Morrison (1945). The body of work laid down by these five -- Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Morrison -- is still the gold standard for British pop music. And if one is a fan of guitar gods, one could add Jimmy Page (1944), Eric Clapton (1945), and Jeff Beck (1944) to the list.

The same is true of America, where the most important artists were all pre-Boomers, e.g., Dylan (1940), Brian Wilson (1942), Hendrix (1942). In addition to the Beach Boys, the most important and influential groups included the Byrds (Roger McGuinn, 1942), Buffalo Springfield (Stills, 1945, Young, 1945), the Doors (Morrison 1943), Velvet Underground (Lou Reed, 1942). Other important songwriters were Paul Simon (1941) and Leonard Cohen (1934!), but one could name many more.

I wouldn't even be surprised if none of the performers at Woodstock were Boomers. Just checked: there was Tim Hardin (1941), Creedence (Fogerty, 1945), Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick, 1939), Janis Joplin (1943), and Joe Cocker (1944). Only Carlos Santana makes the cut, at 1947, but he's probably lying about his age.

Finally, none of the greatest soul artists were Boomers: Ray Charles (1930), James Brown (1933), Aretha (1942), Mavis Staples (1939), Marvin Gaye (1939), Smokey Robinson (1940), Sly Stone (1943), and countless others.

In reality, rock music only began to deteriorate after my generation got ahold of it. If one has only the above artists in one's collection -- and no serious collection is complete without them -- one would have a pretty good idea of what rock music is all about.

I can't think of any important or truly novel (in a good way) developments that have occurred in the genre after 1973 or so, since which time it's all been recycling and posturing, combined with a kind of ridiculous exaggeration of certain elements of the music: "rebellion," "non-conformity," "authenticity" -- meaning hollow and self-aggrandizing caricatures thereof, to be exact. Frankly, rock music has become about itself, in a way that it couldn't have been for its originators. At some point along the line it became simply a derivative, reactionary, and inbred lifestyle -- really, just a silly attitude of perpetual adolescence, and the juvenile politics to go along with it.

Obviously, the first generation of rock musicians couldn't have been influenced by rock, since it didn't exist. So what were their influences? Pretty much everything. Their ears were wide open to a host of influences, including a form of R & B that hadn't yet completely detached from jazz, and therefore had not just elements of swing, but of actual musicianship. Most of those guys who played on Atlantic and Motown sessions had some serious jazz chops.

The Beatles and Kinks were influenced by British music hall and other genres (the Beatles' first two albums included the Broadway show tunes A Taste of Honey and 'Til There Was You, while Brian Wilson's harmonies would be inconceivable without the Four Freshmen). Chuck Berry's guitar style was developed as a way to mimic the call-and-response sound of big band horn sections, as were the doo-wop harmonies of Dion and the Belmonts.

So what happened to the Boomer generation? Why do they, you know, suck? I think it is because they did the same thing with music that they did with everything else that preceded them: they tossed it all aside as being hopelessly outdated. For them, pretty much everything started in around 1964, or shortly after JFK was assassinated. And then they simply took credit for whatever they liked about the past. What they don't like is projected into contemporary conservatives in a transparently childish manner. But we are not the ones who were in bed with those southern racists for all those years. (Cue troll bearing the mythic "southern strategy.")

For example, they even decided that JFK was one of them, even though, if one actually reads his speeches, he was far closer to Ronald Reagan than to Barack Obama, whom he would have undoubtedly despised. Back then, not only was there a sharp distinction between liberal and left, but Democrats were just as anti-left as Republicans. I just finished McCollough's celebrated biography of Harry Truman, and he would have vomited at the thought that the party has been hijacked by people such as Reid, Pelosi, and Frank.

But that is what happened after the Boomers came of age. They tried to get their way by rioting in 1968, but eventually succeeded in nominating their man, McGovern, in 1972. Obama is simply the final fruition of that retrograde impulse. If he prevails in 2012, it certainly won't be a result of the post-boomers whom he treats as his personal piggy bank. Rather, he'll need widespread support of the greedy and entitled Worstest Generation.

It would be crossing the line to agree with Pete Townshend that we hope they transition from AARP to harp before they bankrupt us. But it may be our only hope.

The Strawberry Walrus Never Knows

As I've mentioned in the past, one of the influences on the One Cosmos method -- Method? I don't see any method at all, sir.

Ahem. One of the influences on the One Cosmos method (not content) was the free-ranging fertile egghead and stoned philosopher, Terence McKenna, whose peculiar late-night riffing first alerted me to the centrality of language to transdimensional communication, while I was otherwise occupied stocking shelves on the graveyard shift at Malibu Market Basket, store 81.

The above -- "language is central to transdimensional communication" -- is a tautology, of course, like saying that language is important to language. Nevertheless. We live in so many different intelligible worlds, that it's easy to forget -- or to imagine that just one type of language is sufficient to cover the waterfront and back, both inside and out.

There is more or less horizontal, person-to-person communication, which can be exterior and superficial, or which can take on degrees of interiority, depth, and intimacy.

Then there is scientific communication, say, of what goes on down there in the micro world of atomic and subatomic reality, or the language of DNA. There is artistic communication, either in word, sound, or image, "body language," even just good or bad vibes.

And yet, it's all word in some form or fashion, i.e., something transmitted and received, something intelligible to intelligence.

McKenna often spoke of the development of what he called a "more perfect logos." I just googled the phrase, and in this talk, he says that

"the world arrives at the surface of our skin as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data. It’s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we’re close to McLuhan country here: I think what this hints at is that print skewed our perceptual apparatus, our style of parsing perceptual data, toward the acoustic space. So that for us, thought became a voice… you know? And very early in the Western tradition, this is so. Jehovah is a voice in the Old Testament; the Logos is a voice. In Hellenistic philosophy, we are the People of the Voice. But apparently, you know, there is a passage in Philo Judaeus where he talks about the etymology of the word Israel, and he says “Israel means He who sees God” -- he who sees God. And then he poses the question to himself: “What is the more perfect Logos?” And then he says, “The more perfect Logos is that Logos which goes from being heard to being seen, without ever passing over a moment of noticeable transition.”

Elsewhere in the talk he speaks of encountering "linguistic objects" during his chemical adventures, which he compares to "three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it’s an A, B, C, D pun; and it’s simultaneously all these things… well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output -- in other words, a printed pun -- in the DMT world, objects can do this. Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once. And, something like a pun, the result is always funny. It’s amusing! You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing."

So if you want to trace the origin of our annoying freevangelical pundamentalism, McKenna would be it (although he in turn was greatly influenced by Finnegans Wake). However, he and I parted ways with his reliance upon chemistry to develop the method of 5-D linguistics. I, on the other hand, not only wanted to see if it might be possible for a punformational techgnosistry to be accomplished on the natch, but wanted to, in a manner of speaking, transmit a kind of "contact high" via my exalted and hopped up wranting.

I mean, what are they going to say, man, when he's gone, huh? Because he dies, when it dies, man, when it dies, he dies. What are they going to say about him? What, are they going to say, he was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit, man! Am I going to be the one, that's going to set them straight? Look at me: wrong! You! You were the one!

Weird, I know, but there it is. Another big influence was John Lennon, who was uniquely capable of translating his chemical adventures into word and sound, at least in 1966 and 1967, e.g., Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields, and I Am the Walrus.

Just as it is possible to consider the evolution of science as the evolution of language, so too is it possible to regard the evolution of Spirit in this manner.

Consider the language spoken by the biosphere. According to standard Darwinism, what really "evolves" is just the genetic code, which speaks new and different organisms. Thus, a human being is just a more complicated sentence. In one sense this is surely true, since it obviously takes a lot more time and trouble to speak a man than a worm.

Likewise, the physical world speaks to us in mathematical equations, or the periodic table of elements. Here it is difficult to know which is more shocking, the communication or the comprehension, but the truth is that the one cannot exist in the absence of the other.

The evolution of science itself can be seen as the evolution of language, which gradually penetrates more deeply into phenomena. For example, the language of quantum physics proceeds deeper than the language of Newtonian physics, but no one pretends that we have reached the end of the line. For one thing, physicists haven't yet discovered a meta-language that unifies the languages of relativity and quantum theories, or macro with micro.

But as soon as one thinks about it, nor is there -- supposedly -- any language that unifies, say, the interior and exterior worlds, the worlds of quantity and quality, the subject and the object. Or is there?

Revelation, for example, is supposedly a language that reconciles Absolute and relative, Creator and creation, God and man. Now, irrespective of one's personal opinion of this or that scripture, the interesting question -- as far as we are concerned -- is whether this kind of language is possible. For if it is possible, then we have to do something about it! And this blog, of course, is my best shot.

Another way of saying it is that if this type of language is possible, then it is necessary. In other words, if it didn't exist, then we'd have to invent it, if only to maintain our sanity. And that is precisely what our secular sophisticates tell us: that we simply make this s*it up. So smoke another J, Bob. Keep it flowing.

There are two main sections of the bʘʘk in which I attempt to develop a better logos, one of them "saturatedly unsaturated," the other "unsaturatedly saturated." In other words, in both cases there is an intentional dialectic between symbols and suprasensible things. The former applies to the Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration sections, in which we are attempting to go where words cannot (supposedly) take us, which is to say, "before" and "after" language, into the Word itself.

The latter applies to subsection 4.2, Building a Better Logos: Insert Your Deity Here. This is because the abstract symbols are "empty categories," emphasis on both empty and category. In other words, their purpose is to clear a space where suprasensible meaning is then free to coalesce. But this is not just "any old meaning," as in the case of, say, existentialism. Rather, this is the space of "vertical recollection," in which we receive a memoir of the future or premonition of the past.

Now, if we consider the world from the vertical perspective, and posit a kind of spectrum from infraconscious Ø to ultraconscious O, then the question of whether there are discontinuities will depend upon our point of view. Looked at from the bottom up, then there are indeed a number of shocking discontinuities, for example, from matter to life, or life to mind.

But considered from the top down, these discontinuities not only disappear, but the diverse degrees of being are necessary implications of having a manifestation at all. In other words, since the cosmos is not the Absolute, but a reflection thereof, it necessarily includes every degree of being, from the lowest to highest.

Just as there are (obviously) beings that exist between matter and man, there are beings who exist between man and God. We call these "angels," but if that term disturbs you, we can call them archetypes, or Platonic ideas, or universals.

However, if you agree with the premise that the source of Life is at the top, not bottom, of the cosmos, then it is no great leap to infer that they are "alive." Rather, it would require some sort of discontinuous leap to explain how the archetypes can be there at all, can interact with us, and yet, be "dead." How did these nonlocal attractors get there? And why are they so compelling? Why do they order our lives, even if we try to escape them?

In Theo-Logic, Balthasar discusses these entities, which, in our opinion, must exist in any full-employment cosmos. He writes that "An angel's word must be like the work of an earthly artist, which rises above every convention of its expressive medium and bears on its brow the sign of creative uniqueness. Just as this symphony can be only by Haydn or Mozart, so too an angelic word can be spoken only be this angel."

Here we begin to converge upon the mysterious source of our own cosmic uniqueness and individuality, which, again, cannot come from "below," but only above. It is another way of saying that each person is an absolutely unique word -- or sentence, or paragraph, or novel -- that is both spoken and heard (which are again two sides of the same complementarity).

Balthasar continues: "Corresponding to the freedom to speak there is a freedom to hear that we must bear in mind: the attitude of self-surrender on the part of the speaker presupposes a corresponding attitude of surrender in the listener. Without an element of confident faith that relies upon the truth, it is inconceivable that even a pure spirit could hear and listen."

If you have followed me this far, then you now understand why it is necessary for us to surrender to the one who is speaking us, in order to receive and comprehend the message, or unpack his presence.

That is all. You can exhale now, neighbor.

O and ʘ Tattooed Across the Knuckles of My Head

If only I could read my mind.

What a hell that would be! Life is only bearable because we do not and cannot completely know ourselves, or anyone else, for that matter. I love the sound of surprise in the morning. For us it is always Raccoon Day, never Groundhog Day.

Know thyself! But not completely. Leave that to the Creator.

This thoughtlet may have nothing to do with the post that is presently aborning, but it spontaneously popped into one of our brains upon reading the following words (by W. R. Mead) at American Digest:

"Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes. In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other."

You know, left brain, right brain, transcendent brain. The meadle way of the intersubjective third appears to be the *point* of the first two, given the impressive size of the corpus callosum, which is our suspension bridge between the she & hemispheres. This is similar to how man and wife do not constitute marriage, but rather, are a declension from this primordial condition.

Thus, it would be an error to say that the transcendent position is merely a "synthesis" or integration of left and right; rather, the left and right hemispheres are a declension from the "total reality" of the third.

Neither one hemisphere nor the other has the "carrying capacity" to contain the cosmos, which is why the scientist has one piece and the poet another piece of aseity. Still, the poet usually gets more.

Say, just what religion do you profess, Bob?

The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.

I don't know about you, but we are "composed" of soul and body, or form and substance, but here again, these are a declension from something higher. One might say that time is necessary in order for this higher whatever to disclose itself, which it could never do "all at once," any more than one could perform a symphony in an instant by playing all its notes at once.

Balthasar says something similar in writing that "the spirit is veiled from itself in order that it might seek and find itself, not in itself, but in the infinite spirit that created it and that alone is perfect self-possession." Thus, the seeking is, orthoparadoxically, simultaneously "exterior" to us, and yet, interior.

This goes to what we were saying yesterday about the dialectic of our individualism and social-ism. Note that Jesus' own kenosis, or self-emptying, must represent a kind of analogue of the kenosis represented by creation itself. The kenosis actually "takes place" within the Godhead, as it were, as one gives all to two, and two back to one.

Therefore, as Balthasar notes, "spirit's self-possession is inseparable from the primary self-dispossession, entailed in its dependence upon external objects. Receptivity is thus like a deep, unclosable breach opened up in the closed circle of being-for-itself."

In short, a kind of paradox: "Only by welcoming things from the outside and remaining open to them, only by being given over to the service of what is other than itself, can man's spirit lay claim to a being of its own" (ibid.).

So let's give it up for the Creator!

I hope this isn't sounding too lowdown heideggerical, but what this essentially means is that the "fuel" of the cosmic gyrescape is the "self-dispossession" that seeks completeness via incompleteness, or independence via dependence. Or, in the recreational pharmulation of the Beatles, "The love you take is equal to the love you make," as it were.

Now, we can only be open to one another (i.e., horizontally) if we are first open to God (i.e., vertically), whether we like to think of it that way or not. Again, I do not make the rules. But no matter how "close" we may feel to the other, our solitude is "sealed forever by the incommunicability of spirit."

However, I would qualify this by saying that there can be no true communion with others in the absence of the unifying "higher third" referenced above. Indeed, what is this blog but a site for soirees where we see together with the third eye?

The same goes triple for the transcendent "body of Christ" of which the universal church is composed (including the sheep not of our folderal).

Think of the (admittedly impossible) alternative, of a universe of all-knowing spirits. This would be as boring as a MENSA meeting or as tedious as any Ivy League fatuity lounge.

For one thing, it would be "devoid of mystery," such that "every conversation, every exchange between these freest of entities would be restricted to a communication of something already known and possessed; it would therefore be superfluous" (ibid.).

Yes, but what we all want to know is, how does this affect Bob? Well, I started blogging almost six years ago, in October 2005. By November 2005 it was getting to be a grind, because there was nothing left for me to say. At that point I gave up trying, and simply dispossessed my Self of myself. So you could say that it's been non-stop bullshitting since then, but never say that it hasn't been empty bullshitting.

On Having Faith in Reality

One simply cannot comprehend the cosmos without appreciating the orthoparadoxical reality of continuity and discontinuity, which, in a way, is quite similar to the complementarity of wave/particle in quantum physics.

Unfortunately, the shocking nature of this complementarity has been reduced to a bit of a cliche, but it means that at bottom, the cosmos manifests in two mutually exclusive ways, as continuous (wave) and discontinuous (particle).

I do believe that this complementarity is here to stay, irrespective of what physicists may or may not discover in the future. That is to say, it is not physical but metaphysical, and is a vital principle for understanding most everything; and not just in an abstract and theoretical way, but in an existential, phenomenological, and experience-near manner.

To cite one obvious example, man is a social animal, and yet, a unique individual. Not only are these two absolutely inseparable, but there is no possibility of individualism in the absence of a prior ground of social-ism (obviously not in the political sense, which defeats its very purpose by trying to impose an exterior socialism on what can only be interior and spontaneous).

I might add that this complementarity provides a quite natural way to think about the trinitarian nature of the Godhead, in which there is distinction but no separation, which is none other than Love, baby, yeah!

Curiously, mine is the only book of which I am aware (out of 129,864,880 in the entire world) in which the chapters are both continuous and discontinuous, as God intended. But despite my loneliness in the face of these daunting odds, I nevertheless believe that I am in the right. And one man with delusions makes a majority, at least in his dreams.

(Although, come to think of it, if I am not mistaken, the Hebrew Bible has no punctuation, but is one continuous stream of Words.)

So, now you are in a position to understand what Balthasar means when he writes in his Theo-Logic that "Although spirit is something qualitatively new with respect to all natural entities, it is at the very same time the crowning of an ever more unmistakable development in nature itself."

In other words, spirit is both alpha and omega, in that it is simultaneously an "attainment," and yet, the underlying ground, or surrounding tortilla, of the whole existentialada. One might say that, just as in individual development, the cosmos becomes what it already is, which is what we call in the book Cosmotheosis, another word that should have been made up long ago.

Please note as well that theosis (or divinization, or sanctity) of the individual is simultaneously (due to the spatially and temporally holographic nature of the cosmos) the crowning achievement of the cosmos itself, the beyond which of which there is no whicher.

This is directly addressed by Paul, who wrote of how "the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs until now" (Rom 8:22-23), just as we do. Every time the cosmos gives birth to an individual, the individual gives birth to a cosmos, in an ever-ascending spiral. This we call the cosmic gyroscape (sometimes joyrescape), or unabsurcular stairway.

Here again, we must insist that there can be no neutral or fully "objective" truth, since prior to truth is relationship -- for example, the relationship between knower and known. But what is this relationship? Again, it must be love, or so we have heard from the wise.

Now, recall what we were saying the other day about reality, i.e., the Absolute, manifesting as either Truth or Presence; the former is on the plane of knowing, or intellect, while the latter is on the plane of being, which for us is life. Any revelation must partake of both, i.e., knowledge and being -- what we symbolize as (n), to distinguish it from mere (k) -- and it is not difficult to see why.

Obviously, no contact with God -- or O -- is experienced in a neutral manner, shorn of such elements as awe, mystery, wonder -- in a word, presence, or the old mysterium tremendum et fascinans, i.e., (?!), the sacred WTF! For some it is the guffah-HA! experience, which is sometimes funny, other times quite serious, especially when the punchline is oneself and the yoke is on us. But don't worry, it's a light wave for your private particle.

So, "no communication of truth is devoid of mystery, for truth is never so unconcealed that no aspect of the thing is left outside its revelation." Again, truth proceeds from inside --> to outside --> back inside, but never in such a way that it exhausts itself (or us!).

And in communication that is "free," i.e., between two subjects, the truth is limited by "the freedom of the one revealing." Now, truth is not just a kind of "fact" waiting to be discovered, but a testimony, which can only be received in faith, i.e., faith that the revealer is not pulling our leg: "Without this faith, any exchange of truth between free entities is unthinkable."

Moreover, "To exclude testimony and faith from the way in which spirits communicate would be to dislodge their freedom from the center of their intelligence." I symbolize this complementarity as O, on the one end, and (o) at our end, or simply "openness to O."

"Only by welcoming things from the outside and remaining open to them, only by being given over to the service of what is other than itself, can man's spirit lay claim to a being of its own. And only if it has served the world can it hope for the measure of independence due it as spirit" (ibid.).

Testimony requires a witness. Is the witness reliable? Can we trust him? Can we place our faith in him? Shall we Cross-examine him?

This blog is never about mere facts. Rather, there is always an element of testimony. Am I asking for your faith? Yes, but surely not blind faith, rather, only faith in reality and in our ability to comprehend and convey it.

I would never knowingly lie to you, but even so, I would not advise putting faith in me, since I am the faithful one here, faithful to the testimony of the Other. If you have a problem, you really need to take it up with him, not me. For I am just an errant boy zenned by glossary quirks to correct some bull.

(All the Balthasar quotes are taken from Theo-Logic vol. I.)

Being Liberal Means Always Having to Say You're Sordid

For this morning's repast of a repost, we have chosen an easy-to-digest morsel from three years back. It will be pure rewordgitation for longtimeless readers, but may be of some assistance to new readers as well as long-time obsessives who, no matter how many posts they read, don't understand where we are coming from. (Some light editing, including use of the royal We, because we think it's somehow funnier that way.)

Alright, let's resolve this thing once and for all. 200,000 years is long enough for anyone to have to live in darkness about his origins. How do we reconcile God and Darwin, Maher and Godwin, Adam and evolution, kings and apes, Elvis and Scatter?

Let us preface this by emphasizing that we are perfectly willing to adopt what science determines to be "true" -- within unbreachable metaphysical limits, of course -- for the same reason we are willing to accept the advice of our doctor that if we do not take insulin, we will surely cash in our chimp.

Put it thisaway. As it so happens, our mother was a Christian Scientist, and we attended Christian Science Sunday school until the age of 10 or so. In fact, one might say that our mother was a devout Christian Scientist, with the exception of the Christian Science part.

That is, when we left the plane of theological abstraction for the world of concrete reality, we took medicine and went to the doctor just like anyone else -- in fact, more so; our mother was a bit of a hypochondriac by proxy. Frankly, there was no attempt whatsoever to reconcile what we heard in Sunday school with what went on the rest of the week, especially if, say, we had a fever of 98.7, in which case it was off to the doctor.

Which undoubtedly played a role in sowing the seeds of religious doubt in our mind, being that we became a vocal atheist by the age of complete ensoulment, or somewhere between the ages of nine or ten.

In our case, the "Christian" indoctrination completely backfired, as it was one of the primary reasons for our rejection of it. Obviously, we are not alone in this regard. The absence of elementary consistency was abundantly evident even to this nine year-old, and a healthy mind seeks unity above all else. It is what the mind does and what it is for. It can also, of course, analyze into parts, but always for the purpose of synthesizing things into a higher and more complex unity. Only a psychotic person prefers to live in a hopelessly sundered world of bizarre and irreconcilable fragments.

The other day, a fellow named Rush Limbaugh made an astute observation, suggesting that the reason Obama is reduced to such a stuttering prick (to quote Tommy DeVito) when off the teleprompter, is that he is a deeply divided person, either consciously or unconsciously (and undoubtedly both, in our opinion). He is the polar opposite of, say, Ronald Reagan, who always knew what he thought and could answer any question, for it was simply a matter of returning to well thought-out first principles and applying them to the problem in question. Very scientific, if you will. (What he could do about these principles was, of course, constrained by certain realities such as a liberal congress dedicated to expansion of the state.)

But one of the intrinsic problems in being a liberal -- as we well remember -- is that one can never reveal one's first principles (at least politicians cannot; those protected by tenure are free to remove the mask), because if one explicitly articulates them, people will be repelled at what a contemptuous, condescending, supercilious, and authoritarian asshat of a control freak one is.

Therefore, one must always couch these principles in terms of "compassion," or "helping the little guy," or "healing the planet," or "unity," or some other such blather. So in this regard, Obama is dealing with a more general problem that is intrinsic to liberalism, which is How to Fool the Idiots. One must be very cautious, because even the idiots are only so stupid. Thus Obama's constant verbal ticks: "uh, uh, uh, let me, uh, say this, uh, uh, I've been completely, uh, consistent about this, aaaaaaaaaand blah blah blah."

Being that liberalism is the political embodiment of multiplicity (or of an oppressive "bad unity" to try to heal it), it should not be surprising that its adherents are so intrinsically inconsistent. It's not so much that they are dishonest, but that the whole ideology is dishonest -- it is a lie from the ground up. Which is also why, the worse one's character (e.g., Ted Kennedy, Anthony Wiener, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd) or the less one's intelligence (Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden), the better one will fare as a liberal politician, because one will be able to lie with such great ease as to even fool oneself.

Anyway, in Mr. Limbaugh's analysis, he was pointing out that Obama is running several campaigns simultaneously, and that it is obviously a struggle for him to keep them all straight in his head, thus the great difficulty in being consistent and giving straight answers. Because of this, he is always one gaffe away from an accidental revelation of truth. For example, he's running one campaign for blacks, but an entirely different one for whites. (Here is a partial list of the various irreconcilable positions which Obama must hopelessly try to keep straight in his crooked mind.)

Our point is that in the ultimate sense, science is the reduction of exterior multiplicity to interior or subjective unity. But the only reason this is possible is because the human intellect mirrors the unity of creation. Our mind operates the way it does because we live in a cosmos, which is to say, an ordered totality.

And the cosmos can only be an ordered totality because it exhibits nonlocal internal relations. Because of this, every part of the cosmos embodies and participates in the whole, just as every gene contains the blueprint for the whole body, and everyman is potentially allmen. Again, the cosmos is thoroughly entangled with itself, which is why we may know anything and also why we may know anything knowable. It is how and why Man may be the microcosmos he is to the macrocosmos.

Now, metaphysics is obviously about first principles. Our intention is to have a completely consistent metaphysic, so that, in order to answer any question, we need only return to first principles, and take it from there. In this sense, Darwinism (unleavened with any verticality) is a lie, because it cannot furnish any consistent first principles. In fact, whenever a committed Darwinist tries, he ends up making self-refuting statements right out of the box, just like a liberal politician; one cannot be a champion of human dignity and materialism any more than one can be a partisan of statism and liberty.

"Young earth" creationism makes the same sort of error, in that it contradicts so much evidence that in order to maintain it, one will essentially have to split one's mind in two. One will live in a scientific world with all of its blessings, and yet, a part of oneself will have to reject it, or at least not be able to fully integrate it into one's belief system. We do not believe the Creator wishes us to live this way, with the left brain not knowing what the right brain is up to.

The other day we half-jokingly mentioned that our right brain agrees with Schuon about evolution, while our left brain agrees with Aurobindo (or Teilhard, if you like). One of Bion's adages (which he borrowed from someone else) is that the answer is the disease that kills curiosity. In the case of our bʘʘk, we have posted in the past about how it was essentially the fruit of years spent in the state of higher bewilderness, essentially trying to beat this coonundrum of Adam and evolution. In a sense, it would be easy to just come down on one side or the other, and make it go away.

But for us to do this, we would feel as if we were back to the di-polar life of a doctor-shopping Christian Science hypochondriac. For better or worse and 'til death do us whole, the way our minds are built, they seek an integrated unity, which is a very different thing from "unicity," or bland, flatland uniformity.

In other words, to simply accept an ideology -- whether scientific or religious -- and superimpose it upon the world would be an example of unicity. Such a worldview will be "consistent" but it will not be complete, as it will necessarily have to omit and underlook a lot of details and anomalies, to put it mildly.

Or, we may accept both science and religion, and not worry about the lack of reconciliation. Such a world view will be more complete, but it will then lack consistency.

The Raccoon, however, wishes to have a maximum of completeness and consistency -- at least as much as Gödel will allow. Which is a lot, once one accepts the implications of his theorems, one of which is that truth is prior to our fragmentary logical "proofs" of it.

The point is, there must be a deeper way to harmonize revelation and science. But the only way to arrive at this is to dwell in the bewilderness and actually ratchet up the tension, as opposed to prematurely resolving it. The same thing applies to psychotherapy, at least as Bion envisioned it.

For example, a therapist might have a pretty good idea of what is going on with a patient after the very first session. But it won't do the patient any good to simply provide him the answer, which would essentially foreclose the evolution of O by superimposing mere (k) upon it.

Rather, what one wants to happen is for O to evolve into genuine (k) in the patient; it is the difference between (k)-->Ø and O-->(k). In order to accomplish the latter, one must exercise Yeats, I mean Keats, "negative capability," which is to dwell in "uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

If one does this long enough, one will eventually "snap." Now, being that a Raccoon is an extreme seeker and off-road spiritual aspirant, one might say that he wants the ultimate spiritual adventure. Therefore, he will constantly feed his head with inconsistencies and contradictions until it basically implodes in an inverted but even Bigger Bang than the one at the other end.