What Did You Do in the Spiritual War?

What if a spiritual war were going on and no one recognized it?

"Modern Western populations," writes Bruce Charlton, "are only semi-human in their mass perceptions and responses -- since they lack the stable centre of religion, and are metaphysically incoherent; they live inside an artificial and distorted world; and their minds are continually filled-with and distracted-by lying nonsense -- all of this in an unprecedented fashion and degree."

Concur. Our adversaries live inside a Matrix -- which has been carefully constructed for them by forces beyond their conscious control.

Thus, "the true agenda of evil is not just beyond their belief, but beyond their comprehension -- lacking God, they cannot recognise nor understand the nature of evil (and are, indeed, inclined to deny its truth and rationality)" (ibid.). As did our anonymous but always illustrative commenter yesterday, when I merely pointed out that the suppression of truth is the essence of evil. He even went so far as to suggest that doing so violates none of God's laws.

No, it's worse than that, for truth is one of God's names; to attack or thwart it is to smite the Creator. It is to pound another nail into the Cross.

We've been toying with the idea of "principles of history," but maybe we should be talking about the principalities of history. Or worse, perhaps history itself is a principality -- you know, a kind of satanic playground. That would explain why the war has been going on for, oh, 50,000 years.

Is there any reason to believe such perfect nonsense? I don't yet have any central thread, only a pile of books on my desk which may lead in the right direction. For example, of the appeasers of the 1930s, Manchester writes that "like all fundamentalists" they "held facts in contempt." But it was more than mere facts; rather, their minds attacked the conclusion to which the facts inevitably led.

The conclusion was known, but had to be rendered un-known. For example, upon reading a damning book called The House that Hitler Built, Neville Chamberlain wrote that "If I accepted the author's conclusions I should despair, but I don't and I won't" (in Manchester). Well, that was easy!

Let's try it out: If I accepted the idea that the Iranians cannot be trusted and that the nuclear agreement isn't worth the paper it is written on, I should despair, but I don't and I won't.

Or, If I accepted the idea that the left wishes to foment racial antagonism and a war on the police, I should despair, but I don't and I won't.

I feel better already!

Our anonymous commenter criticizes us for supporting Trump. If he has any better ideas as to how to stop Hillary and defeat the left, I'd like to hear them. As Prager has said, Trump is like using chemotherapy to fight cancer: yeah, it's going to make you sick and cause a lot of damage, but what choice do you have?

"Historians a thousand years hence," Churchill told parliament, "will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory -- gone with the wind!"

Yes, historians will be baffled. But what about Raccoons? Should we be baffled by America's entirely self-willed decline? I don't see why. Let us consult one of our Vertical Fathers, Don Colacho. "Civilizations are the summer noise of insects between two winters."

Better bundle up.

"The external adversary is less the enemy of civilization than is internal attrition."

Oh, that and demographic flooding. Which is why the left favors open borders, which is just genocide -- and worse, pneumacide -- by other means. The left can't defeat our ideas, but they can stampede over them.

"Those who live in the twilight of history imagine the day is being born when night is approaching."

The Obama era, dawn of a new day!

D'oh!

"Modern history is the dialogue of two men, one who believes in God, another who believes he is god."

I disagree. Dialogue with Obama is impossible.

"Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future."

Which is why if we don't somehow take back the educational system -- now a wholly owned and operated franchise of the Dark Aeon -- a deepening metastasis of the left's grim utopia is inevitable.

Out of time here. And tomorrow must be sacrificed to the serpent of Continuing Education, so no post. BTW, I was surprised to learn that as many as 24% of psychiatrists are Republican. Among woolly-headed and thoroughly feminized psychologists the figure is surely lower. But if you're out there, please show yourself. I am occasionally asked for a referral to a sane therapist.

Patterns of Cosmic Stupidity

You know how Hillary and Obama don't want us to refer to "Islamic terror," because if we do, then normal, peace-loving Muslims will want to chop off our heads?

Well, some things never change. Back in 1937, outgoing prime minister Stanley Baldwin joined his successor, Neville Chamberlain, in expressing the sentiment to members of parliament "that if they felt they must deplore totalitarianism and aggression, they must not name names."

"It was important," implored Baldwin, "to avoid 'the danger of referring directly to Germany at a time when we are trying to get on terms with that country'" (Manchester).

Consider this an open thread, since I don't have much time this morning -- in fact, for the rest of the week. It's October, and it's an even-numbered year, which means I have until the end of the month to complete my 36 hours of discontinuing education. Something has to give, and you're looking at it.

TRIGGER WARNING: some readers have expressed the view that my deployment of any salty language diminishes the blog. TURN BACK NOW.

Recall that we were just about to dive headlong into Principles of History, if there are any. The above example may or may not reveal a principle, but it certainly suggests a pattern.

But why should naming evil cause good people to want to turn evil? That doesn't make any sense. And why should evil people care if someone calls them evil? Evil people don't care what others think, except insofar as they can manipulate them.

Another parallel: Obama and Clinton say that naming the evil is a great recruiting tool for the evildoers. Therefore, appeasing them should lessen their appeal and thin their ranks.

Okay. How'd that work out? "Time increased Hitler's momentum.... Now that England had shown the white feather, recruits swelled in the ranks of the Nazi parties in Austria, Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, western Poland, and the Free City of Danzig." Hmm, exactly the opposite of what the Theory of Appeasement would predict.

Besides, if going after enemies creates more of them, why does the left never stop attacking our deplorable asses??

You know how the Palestinian cause -- not to mention Bernie Sanders and liberal fascism in general -- is so popular on college campuses and among Hollywood and media eliterates? Well, by the mid-1930s, "Nazism had become fashionable in London's West End. Ladies wore brackets with swastika charms; young men combed their hair to slant across their foreheads.... The Fuhrer still had many admirers in Parliament and a lofty one (King Edward VIII) in Buckingham Palace."

Each generation must learn anew the same lessons. Especially this one: "History is mankind's painfully purchased experience, now available for free, or merely the price of attention and reflection" (Thomas Sowell).

Oh, and one more -- a memo to the Kaeperdicks among us: "There is not one of our simple uncounted rights today for which better men than we have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield" (Churchill).

Principles of History

Are there any? Supposedly not. As far as I know, that idea is rejected by contemporary historians as an outmoded relic of history. In other words, historians used to think history meant something. Now we know it means nothing -- that any patterns we see are superimposed, that it never repeats itself, and that it has no intrinsic direction.

Even if true, how could one know that?

But more to the point, I really don't feel like blogging this morning. Last night, before going to bed, the idea of writing about this subject popped into my head. Must have been a side effect of what I was saying the other day about my never-to-be-written book, Ground and Principle. In short, what is the ground of history? And does it reveal any abstract principles that are always present?

But this morning my mind is on strike. I think it has to do with the Dodgers playing at 1:00 on a Monday afternoon. What the heck? Since when doesn't Los Angeles get a prime-time TV slot?

Stupid Cubs. Just because their streak of futility is of cosmic dimensions, and may finally end, they get the late game. Which throws everything off for Bob. Now I have to hurry up and get my work done before then, which means I should probably get to it right now instead of wasting timelessness blogging.

No, I can't just record the game. That's fine during the regular season, but I can't bring myself to do so for a playoff game.

So here we are, at loggerheads with ourselves. Well, I'm going to force myself to blog, just to show my mind who's in charge.

I just googled "principles of history," and the first thing that comes up is R.G. Collingwood's book of the same title. I've read several of his books, including one called The Idea of History, but not that one.

As to the latter, it says in the introduction that Collingwood began working on it during the late 1930s, when the "revolt against civilization" represented by communism and fascism "had to be resisted at all costs."

That's a good point: fascists and communists certainly had their theories of history, as do Islamists. How do you defend against people who believe that history has ironclad laws assuring your destruction? "Ha ha, the joke's on you, because history means nothing and is going nowhere!"

That's pretty much what we tell the Islamists -- which only means that they are motivated to fight for their principles, whereas the left is too broadminded to have any worth defending.

One of Collingwood's historical principles was the gradual "elimination of force from the relations between people." Woo hoo! Now there's a principle worth defending. Our persistent troll doesn't understand that this is ultimately the principle we are defending in supporting Trump, since Obama and Clinton and the left in general are always about the increase of force between people. Indeed, this goes to the very Principle of America -- its reason for being -- i.e., the principle of ordered liberty.

Last night's question about supreme court appointments was instructive. Trump's was simple, as it should be: that he'll appoint judges who will support and defend the constitution. But Clinton promised to appoint judges who will ignore the constitution and crank out opinions based upon leftist ideology. Her answer was really quite remarkable.

"I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real life experience." Excuse me, but WTF is that supposed to mean? Besides, "understanding the way the world works" is precisely what a liberal cannot do and remain liberal. Liberalism is rooted in a mis- (and sometimes dis-) understanding of both human nature and of the operating principles of spaceship earth.

This actually goes to our subject, because if there are principles of history, it would mean that they transcend perspective. One, er, principle that seems to animate contemporary historians is that history is irreducibly perspectival, which is why we have all these intellectually worthless (if not harmful) disciplines of black history, or queer history, or Chicano history, and all the rest.

I mean, feminists say that math, objectivity, and the scientific method are oppressive tools of white male privilege, so you can imagine what they do to softer subjects. I say: Teach women not to rape history!

When "principles of history" popped into my noggin, the first example I thought of was Churchill, who clearly saw certain patterns and principles at work in the 1930s, but was ignored or vilified by elites who knew better. It is rather remarkable that most everything he said would equally apply to the Islamist threat -- which again goes to the idea that our struggle is against more enduring powers, principalities, and Cosmocrats of the Dark Aeon.

Example.

"If you want to stop war, you gather such an aggregation of force on the side of peace that the aggressor, whoever he may be, will not dare challenge..."

Is that just an opinion, or a principle? For the likes of Obama, it amounts to a lie, hence his reckless project of disarmament and weakening of our military.

Churchill reasoned that "to urge preparation of defense is not to assert the immanence of war. On the contrary, if war was immanent preparations for defense would be too late."

But his opponents -- which was pretty much Everyone -- "repeatedly refused to believe that Hitler was what Hitler was. They had, in short, developed the political equivalent of a mental block." They "believed they were preserving the peace when in fact they were assuring the inevitability of war." And "inevitability" implies a kind of principle at work.

Indeed, Churchill spoke of "the features which constitute the endless repetition of history," of the "long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind."

Unteachable? Here is what the London Times wrote of a speech of Hitler's in 1936, that it was "reasonable, straightforward, and comprehensive. No one who reads it with an impartial mind can doubt" the peaceful intentions of the Fuhrer. Are these same idiots running the NY Times editorial board and the DNC? No, but the same principalities are.

Must stop. Work to do.

Between God and Religion

Another unblogged book sitting on my desk is Schuon's Christianity/Islam -- the only one of his (excluding poetry) I hadn't read. The reason I hadn't read it is in the title, as I am not particularly interested in Islam. But you know what they say: just because you don't take an interest in Islam doesn't mean Islam won't take an interest in you.

As usual, Schuon's perspective is far more universal than any single creed. He may or may not be correct, but one of his central principles is that each legitimate (God-given) revelation is an expression of universal metaphysics tailored to this or that cultural or ethnic group.

Thus the subtitle: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism. For Schuon, the esoteric perspective is the only way to overcome certain inevitable incoherences and absurdities in religion -- not just in a religion, but between religions as well. As such, he is speaking of the "esoteric perspective" that transcends and unifies individual religions.

If such a thing exists. I think it is possible to take an intermediate position on the question. For example, rather than saying that only one religion is correct and all the others wrong; or that all religions are equally correct; or that all religions are equally wrong; we can say that this or that religion is a more or less adequate expression of certain truths embodied in religion as such.

Think of the analogy to music. We could say that "music as such" exists in the abstract. But in order to express musical truth or beauty, you need to "pick a path," so to speak, e.g., classical, jazz, blues, rock, whatever. Bach expressed the divine in one way, John Coltrane in another. We can't say that one or the other was wrong, even if we can affirm that one may have disclosed it more fully or adequately.

The book contains some previously unpublished letters, some of which touch on this question. For example, in one he writes that "A true metaphysician cannot unreservedly identify himself with a religious upaya [teaching or method] and take pleasure in it with a kind of nationalism, but obviously must identify with what is essential -- hence both universal and primordial..."

And yet, at the same time, Schuon always insisted that it was necessary to follow a particular religion -- just as you need a musical idiom to express music.

This is a tricky balance, for it seems as if one is trying to give oneself wholeheartedly to a religion even while holding a part of oneself in reserve, so to speak. He says, for example, that "theology tends to push" dogma "to the point of absurdity," but who could argue? Isn't this the problem of fundamentalism or literalism, which surely must alienate people who are not prepared to disable their God-given intelligence in order to embrace a "saving absurdity," so to speak.

In what Schuon calls the mundane "religious viewpoint" -- which you might say is a kind of worldly expression of the otherworldly -- there are certain "dogmatic elements" that are "unacceptable from the viewpoint of truth as such," even while "no doubt possessing a certain spiritually 'therapeutic' function." This cannot help sounding condescending, which would have once appealed to me very much.

Schuon suggests that "It is in the nature of theology to over-accentuate and exclude, and this is why no theology is intellectually perfect, though there are certainly degrees in this." I can't help agreeing with this, even though I also can't help feeling ambivalent about it.

In another letter, Schuon says he doesn't even like writing from the everyday religious perspective: "I would also just as gladly have preferred to spare myself having to deal with Muslim theology -- Lord knows how grating it can be -- but I had no choice since Sufism is situated parallel to this body of doctrine." More generally, "I am hardly enamored of exoterisms and would have preferred to deal only with pure metaphysics and the perennial religion..."

Regarding those latter two -- pure metaphysics and perennial religion -- Schuon was of the belief that the Vedanta was its most adequate expression. In another letter he writes that "we are of Christian origin, and our point of departure is the Vedanta," while being constrained to live in an essentially godless age.

Vedanta, of course, posits a radical monism. And yet, I don't see why it is intrinsically inconsistent with a trinitarianism that is an even "higher" or "deeper" expression of the same truth.

This is why one of my favorite cosmic pneumanauts is Swami Abhishiktananda, AKA the Catholic monk Henri Le Saux, who managed to reconcile the two in his own divided-but-united being.

He did so "through the medium of love, the axial Christian virtue.... The doctrine of the Trinity, understood in light of the advaita, 'reveals that Being is essentially a koinonia [fellowship] of love.' The inner mystery of non-duality 'flowers in communion and inter-subjectivity, revealing itself and coming to full expression in the spontaneous gift of the self to another.'"

"In 'the very depth' of the Upanishadic experience of identity, the Christian may discover 'a reciprocity and a communion of love which, far from contradicting... the unity and non-duality of being, is its very foundation and raison d'être.'"

Elsewhere he compares the Vedantic trinity of sat-chit-ananda to the Christian Trinity: "Being, sat, opens itself at its very source to give birth eternally to the Son..." (Very Eckhartian there.) It "is essentially 'being-with,' communion..., the free gift of the self and mutual communication of love."

Cit, i.e., consciousness or self-awareness "only comes to be when there is mutual giving and receiving, for the I only awakens to itself in a Thou."

Which I've only said about a billion times.

And ananda, the the ultimate felicity or beatitude, "is fulness and perfect fulfillment, only because it is the fruit of love, for being is love."

Ultimately "consciousness (cit) is identified with being (sat) in the infinite bliss (ananda) of the Spirit, who is... one in the Father and the Son, one in God and man, undivided [Sat-chit-ananda]."

"Thus, for Abhishiktananda, the Trinity 'resolves the antinomy of the One and the Many.'" "Christ's experience actually surpasses the Vedantic experience because it recognizes distinction... on its far side, as it were; for Jesus, God is both Other and not-Other."

Makes sense to me us three anyway.

Random Thoughts on the Timeless Scene

Desk clearing time. There are several books that have been sitting on it for months, apparently because they contain some worthwhile nuggets of joy. Here's one by George Rutler called He Spoke to Us: Discerning God in People and Events. That sounds enticing: God speaks. How do we discern and decode the speech?

By the way, the title of this post is a play on Thomas Sowell's occasional desk-clearing exercises he calls Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene. Expect no continuity, or at least be prepared for sudden discontinuities.

"A Russian proverb holds that when the Lord builds a church, Satan pitches a tent across the street."

Analysis: true.

"Chesterton was entranced by the billboard lights in Times Square advertising soaps and cigarettes and hair tonic: 'What a garden of delights this place would be for anyone who couldn't read.'"

Reading is indeed overrated, at least in the wrong hands.

As we know, America's first war (after independence) was with Muslims. "In March of 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the Dey of Algiers to Britain," and "posed a simple question: Why were the Muslims so hostile to a new country that had done them no injury?"

Obviously Jefferson and Adams were not sophisticated enough to know that it was our fault.

Afterwards they reported to congress in a letter stating that "Islam was founded on the Laws of the Prophet" and "that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to paradise."

However, congress favored a strategy of appeasement -- which was not then a dirty word -- via bribery, or "tribute." Adams approved, suggesting that "We ought not to fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever."

What did Churchill say about choosing shame over war, and getting both?

"Tripoli broke its truce, and Jefferson launched the Tripolitan War as soon as he became president." This is of course the "shores of Tripoli" referred to in the Marine Corp Hymn. It was during this crisis that Jefferson obtained a Koran to try to understand what motivated these enemies of liberty. This is the same Koran Obama refers to when he implies that Jefferson thought favorably of Islam because it was in his library.

Ans now you know the rest of the story.

In another essay, Rutler recalls that in Syria, Hitler was hailed as "'Abu Ali,' and the Young Egypt Party called him 'Muhammad Haidar.'" And when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited Hitler, he "obtained a promise from [him] to liquidate the Jews of Palestine after a Nazi victory."

This is by way of a reminder that we do not contend against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, and hosts of wickedness in the high places. The faces change but the forces remain.

No justice no peace. This is true, if we regard justice as the restoration of proper order, because it is harmonious order that results in peace. Which is why leftism can never result in peace, since it tries to impose order from on high in a patently unjust manner. Think of the natural harmony of man and woman in marriage. To undermine this primordial order by judicial fiat is to promote disorder and lack of peace.

"Mix sentimentality with legalism, and you have a diabolical recipe for cruelty. In the twentieth century, totalitarian systems separated power from truth. Once power is autonomous, independent of truth, it is unjust by its self-justification."

"There is no freedom without order and no order without virtue."

"What God knows is not necessarily what God wills."

"Indifference is the fanaticism of the faint of heart."

"There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism. The skeptic questions the truth, while the cynic questions the existence of truth itself."

Bill Buckley once said to a Firing Line guest: "I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would insult your intelligence."

Creative Joy and Human Sacrifice

Well, the early appointment canceled, so I have to renege on my promised lack of a post. I'll use the space to fulfill another broken promise, which was to finish with Corbin yesterday. Then we can move on to a new subject tomorrow, or at least beat an old one to death.

Corbin sounds more trinitarian than strictly uni-theistic to me when he writes that "we must never forget that He is the Lover and the Beloved," and that "it is in His essence to be both one and the other, just as He is the Worshiped, the Worshiper, and the eternal dialogue between the two."

Indeed, if God's essence is Lover, Beloved, and the Love between; or Knower-Known-Knowledge; or Worshiper-Worshiped-Eternal Dialogue; then that seems to me more Christian than Islamic -- or at least I've never heard Muslims speak of God as a one-in-threeness, and vice versa.

Here is a major difference: instead of a preexistent Trinity of eternal communion-in-love, Corbin postulates "a Divine Being alone in His unconditioned essence, of which we know only one thing: precisely the sadness of primordial solitude that makes Him yearn to be revealed in beings who manifest Him to Himself insofar as He manifests Himself to them."

First of all: like anybody could know that. But here we confront a major difference: either God joyfully creates in such a way as to allow creatures to participate in his selfless trinitarian love; or because he is sad and lonely.

No, really: creation "is not the bursting into being of an autarchic Omnipotence, but a fundamental sadness: 'I was a hidden Treasure, I yearned to be known. That is why I produced creatures, in order to be known by them.' This phase is represented as the sadness of the divine Names suffering anguish in nonknowledge because no one names them, and it is this sadness that descended in the divine Breath which is Compassion and existentiation..."

Eh, I don't buy it.

The following, however, rings a bell which 'peals to the process theologian in me: that "creation springs" from "the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being," such that "the Creation is essentially the revelation of the Divine Being, first to himself, a luminescence occurring within Him."

Yeah, I think God surprises himself. But only eternally. Otherwise, how can we call him "Creator"?

I do not believe God creates because he's sad. On the other hand, I do believe the creation must sometimes -- okay, often -- make him sad. Or maybe angry. But one cannot believe a moral agent -- let alone the ground of moral agency -- can be neutral, for example, with regard to members of the Islamic State who urge western followers to engage in random knife attacks:

"Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh. It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after 'modernization' distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war.... However, any such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad."

News you can use!

Oh, and although the Koran calls for decapitation (Sura 8:12), "jihadists are encouraged to go for major organs, arteries or the neck, but not the skull as their knife blade may break. 'It is advised to not necessarily attempt to fully detach the head, as the absence of technique can cause a person to spend a long time attempting to do so, that is, unless the individual’s circumstances and capabilities allow for such.'"

As we've been suggesting, God appears in the form of our ability to comprehend him. What to make of this grotesque form? It is not as if they are the first to call for human sacrifice as a way to obey and manifest the Almighty.

The imagination "is subject to two possibilities, since it can reveal the Hidden only by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to imprison us and catch us in the trap of idolatry" (Corbin).

The imagination is a space where nonlocal realities -- ranging from the upper to lower vertical -- are "materialized." Logically, the only "cure" for the murderous jihadis is Christ crucified, which satisfies the idolatrous impulse to engage in human sacrifice once and for all.

Ground and Principle

Another early appointment tomorrow (Wednesday), so no post. As for this post, I think we'll try to wrap up our discussion of Corbin, because it seems like he's getting a little rerepetitive.

Which I've noticed before in the most frightfully intelligent writers -- that they tend to ramble, repeat themselves, and generally think out loud, thus taxing the reader's patience. This is no doubt a problem of editing; either the lowly editor doesn't understand what the writer is saying, or he is too intimidated to confront him. After all, if the editor could understand everything the Great Man is saying, and express it in a more focussed and succinct manner, he'd be even greater.

I'm noticing the same thing with Churchill, now that I'm moving beyond the immortal phrases and passages, down into the weeds from which they were plucked. Once you do this, the brilliance-to-banality ratio isn't quite so one-sided.

At the other extreme are Dávila and Schuon, for whom each sentence is as if chiseled from granite. I would love to write a book in which each sentence was as concise as Dávila and as penetrating as Schuon. I even have a title for this imaginal book: Ground and Principle. You could say that it would consist of principles that penetrate all the way to the ground; or illuminate the ground from which the principles flow.

For example, yesterday's post touched upon Eckhart's conception of the divine ground, which is close to mine. The best explication of this is in McGinn's The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing.

This is not a book I "learned from" per se. Rather, it was more a shock of recognition, or what I call a vertical recollection. You know the feeling: although in one sense the material may be "new," the sensation is quite distinct, like a key fitting into a door, or the cosmic slot machine paying off. Like this:

Here is Corbin repeating his main point about the nature of the divine ground in man: "the divine form hidden in your being" is "the secret primordial Image in which He knows himself in you and by you, the image you must contemplate in order to become aware that 'he who knows himself knows his Lord.'"

This Image is paradoxically "the same" and "different" from ourselves. Or better, it is "not the same," and yet, "not different": "you know yourself with another knowledge, different from that which you had when you knew your Lord by the knowledge you had of yourself." If I understand him correctly, it's like transitioning from your meager image of God to God's more explosive image of himself in you.

"They [God and man] are not two heterogeneous beings, but one being encountering himself," or a "bi-unity" in which "the same ardent Desire is the cause of the Manifestation and the cause of the Return." Thus, you could say that the ultimate ground of being is this go-round of being from God to man and back again.

Which no doubt sounds cute or annoying or mystagogic, but sitting before me on my desk is a xeroxed passage from Peter Kreeft's Summa of the Summa, which I recognized (via recognosis) the moment I laid eyes on it:

"[T]he overall scheme of the Summa, like that of the universe, is an exitus-redditus, or an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe, which wears a human face, and receives it back through the veins of man's life of love and will."

And knowledge. Or, let's say the ardent desire for, and love of, truth.

In any event, the structure -- or better, ground -- of the creation is "dynamic. It is not like information in a library, but like blood in a being."

Ooooh. That's a bingO!

For it is God who... is the Source and Origin which yearned precisely for this determinate Form, for his own anthropomorphosis. Thus love exists eternally as an exchange, a permutation between God and creature.

Ardent Desire, compassionate nostalgia, and encounter exist eternally, and delimit the area of being. Each of us understands this according to his own degree of being and his spiritual aptitude. --Henry Corbin

Betwixt & Between

We left off Friday with the suggestion that "God describes himself to himself -- and to us -- through ourselves in communion with him. Thus, 'by knowing Him I give Him being' (Corbin). And vice versa, because it is the same inspiraling movement."

Let's see if we can make any further nonsense of this. God gives man the being through which man knows God's being. Thus, it is ultimately "God who makes Himself into God" -- which reminds me of the distinction in the godhead between Being and Beyond-Being. In Schuon's "universal metaphysics," the first movement is from Beyond-Being to Being; the latter is absolute relative to us, but relative from the standpoint of Beyond-Being:

"Being does not coincide with the 'pure Absolute'; it pertains to the Divine Order inasmuch as it is a direct reflection of the Absolute in the Relative, and consequently it is what may be termed paradoxically the 'relatively absolute'" (Schuon).

Indeed, "If the personal God were the Absolute as such, He could not be an interlocutor for man" (ibid.). In other words, again, in order to enter communion with man, God must first appear in a form which man is able to recognize and assimilate. But of Beyond-Being, we can know nothing, precisely. It is the apophatic God, whereas the cataphatic God coincides with his Being-ness -- his manifestavus for the restavus.

Perhaps something sounds wrong or heretical or unorthodox about this. Maybe so, but this is certainly one of the keys to understanding what Meister Eckhart is going on about: "God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something. God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express. God is a being beyond all being; God is a beingless being."

Or "The final goal of being is the darkness and the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light which shines 'but the darkness cannot comprehend it.'" "God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being."

And in one that goes directly to what is said in the first paragraph above, "Just as God breaks through me, so do I break through God in return." In other words, it is two sides of a single movement: "It presses on deeper and deeper into the vortex" and "further and further into the whirlpool" where "God gushes up within himself."

Here is another from the Meister that goes directly to the idea of God wishing to be known by God via humans, so to speak: "Now, it is the nature of a word to reveal what is hidden. The Word that is hidden still sparkles in the darkness and whispers in the silence. It entices us to pursue it, to yearn and sigh after it. For it wishes to reveal to me something about God."

I might add that -- at least in my opinion -- it would be an error to think of Being and Beyond Being as separate; rather, I unvision it as a kind of single flowing movement, or perpetual outflowing from the ultimate source and ground. But just as the the river cannot be separated from the spring from which it flows (or light rays from the sun), God cannot be separated from Godhead.

Back to Corbin: God is "Presence of Himself to Himself, since the being who knows is the very same being in whom He knows Himself." Really, man is just a further iteration of this primordial divine whirlpool of self-knowledge. Which is why we can say, for example, that any knowledge is ultimately knowledge of God.

In fact, there are other human categories that make no sense in the absence of God, for example, authority and law. We have no moral obligation to obey an unjust law. Why? Because such a law is the negation of law, precisely.

And what is authority? Is it just "turtles all the way up," with no ground in a transcendent reality? No, that is tyranny, i.e., authority rooted in nothing but power. Power, in order to be legitimate, must ultimately be rooted in God or nothing.

I remember a gag about a captain of the Royal Navy, who said something to the effect that "if there is not God, than I am not the captain." It also reminds me of people who talk about "first amendment protected speech." This begs the question of why speech is protected at all. The larger point is that speech is grounded in truth and therefore God. Omit that idea and speech is reduced to a privilege granted by the state.

In fact, why do humans have rights at all? There can be no right that doesn't ultimately descend from God. Otherwise they can be granted or denied at will by man.

If we are images of God, this is another way of saying that we are mirrors for God. I read somewhere that Jesus is, as it were, God's image of man and man's image of God; he is a two-way mirror.

Corbin compares it to "an ellipse, one focus of which is the being of God for and through me, while the other is my being for and through Him..." It is an "area enclosing the the two of us," where "He is for me in proportion to my capacity for Him and in which my knowledge of Him is His knowledge of me."

Yes, Corbin is a little repetitive, but perhaps such a strange idea bears repetition. "We have given Him the power to manifest himself through us, Whereas He gave us the power to exist through Him. Thus the role is shared between Him and us" (ibid.).

Say, just what religion do you profess, Preacher?

The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.

Wandering through God's Dreamscape

What I was driving at yesterday is that perhaps more real than God or man alone is the relationship between them. This would be consistent with theologians such as Norris Clarke and John Zizioulas, who speak of Being as being in relation; there is no "substance" that is not substance-in-relation (which is in turn reducible to "self-communicating love").

We've discussed this idea extensively in the past, but Corbin comes at it from a slightly different angel, speaking of "the revelation of God to man" as a theophany that is not only mirrored in man's conversion toward God, but is ultimately the same thing.

Or in other words, as hinted at in yesterday's post, a "religious conversion" takes place in the space where man turns toward God and God toward man, in a single embrace.

Which is why Corbin says that God appears in the form of our ability to comprehend him, even though God is still God and man still man. God is always "the same," and yet, necessarily different for each man, because God's sameness is a sameness-in-relationality, not substance.

Let me say that I am not necessarily advocoting this idea, just spontaneously interacting with the text. We shall see where it all leads as we proceed.

Corbin speaks of a "divine passion for man... motivating the 'conversion' of the divine being toward man," complementing a corresponding "sympathetic state in man, a state in which the divine pathos is revealed." You could say that we cannot know God except in the form of our response to God.

Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. For even straight-up scripture requires a response on our part; it is not soph-evident. Animals, for example, don't respond to it. Which implies that scripture is already God's response to man, in that it is in a form man can comprehend and assimilate. You know what they say: if English was good enough for Jesus, it ought to be good enough for us.

The response on our end "depends on the degree to which man renders himself 'capable of God,' for it is this capacity which defines and measures sympathy as the necessary medium of all religious experience."

Incidentally, I symbolize this sympathy with the wavy equal sign, (≈). However, up to now, I had only considered the resonance from our end; but apparently, (≈) is as much God as man. Which again makes a lot of sense; I'm thinking of an aphorism to the effect that The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters Him (Dávila). It is neither God nor man, but man and God in eternal communion.

While looking up that one I found another: The history of Christianity would be suspiciously human if it were not the adventure of an incarnate god. Christianity assumes the misery of history, as Christ assumes the misery of man.

By entering history, God transforms it to salvation history -- it is no longer just "the actions of man," so to speak, but of the man who encounters God, and the God who encounters man, in history. History is the residue of this transaction (or of its refusal).

Which is why Radical sin relegates the sinner to a silent, gray universe, drifting on the surface of the water, a lifeless shipwreck, toward inexorable insignificance (ibid.).

About this trans-action, I was thinking of this as I walked through the Departed's house yesterday. Every object in it -- not excepting the house itself -- was chosen by a particular soul for a particular reason; it had a personal meaning and significance that only he would know. As such, it is a little like walking through someone else's dreamscape -- through all the little "meanings" that illuminated and guided his life, but also revealed himself to himself -- and to others. It is like one big text.

I suppose you could say that I was struck by a vision of intimate communication. The communication is still occurring, even though the Communicant is no longer with us. Which is no doubt why we are spontaneously reverent toward the Stuff of the Dead. To the Dead it wasn't just stuff, but a cartography of their inner horizon. Which is why the final scene of Citizen Kane is so unsettling, when the workmen are carelessly chucking his stuff into the furnace.

I remember reading of some writer who donated his papers to a university, and they included everything from shopping lists to toenail clippings. That's taking it a little too far. But why? I would say because it doesn't imply any divine encounter -- or any externalization of the soul -- just an absurd and indiscriminate inflation of the mundane, like Hillary Clinton's campaign manifesto.

Orthoparadox: "I was a hidden Treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them." The divine passion is the "desire to reveal Himself and to know Himself in beings through being known by them."

If we are in the image of the Creator, then our tendency to exteriorize our soul via objects and relationships is much like God's tendency to do so. For just as Uncle Jack's house is a kind of self-communicating dreamscape, so too is existence as such. Jesus is God walking through and interacting with his own exteriorized pneumatosphere. Salvation history is its residue.

God describes himself to himself -- and to us -- through ourselves in communion with him. Thus, "by knowing Him I give Him being." And vice versa, because it is the same inspiraling movement.

Our Conversion, and God's

Consider this an open thread with a bit of Bonus Material tacked onto the end. Insufficient time to actually complete our line of thought. Attending a funeral this morning for... is there a word for your wife's step-uncle?

No, it is not what you would call a tragic situation, being that he lived an extremely full 92+ years and was high functioning until the very end -- just a slow fade over a few weeks and a peaceful death at home and in bed. No one wants to go, but if you have to go, well...

You'll notice that he was a war hero who managed to repeatedly cheat death during WW2, with 27 missions in the Pacific theater. Says here that "In 1942-43 it was statistically impossible for bomber crews to complete a 25-mission tour in Europe."

I don't know what the equivalent stat was for the Pacific, but the men surely knew with each mission that they were flying straight into the jaws of death. Surviving that must have made one feel literally bulletproof. Either that or wracked with survivor guilt.

Speaking of full lives, there is a haunting statement in the third volume of Manchester's Churchill biography. If you add it all together, Churchill is arguably the most accomplished man who ever lived.

Indeed, it seems impossible that one man could have been granted so many diverse gifts and exercised them all to the full. And yet, in 1954, when one of his daughters "expressed wonderment of all that he had seen and done in his life," he thought for a moment before responding, "I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end." (I believe he was especially thinking of how the Cold War was simply an extension of WWII, which was an extension of WWI, ad infinitum.)

Dude. I don't know that that was his considered opinion, but still. It is as if he had cheated death on so many occasions -- nor did Churchill have any conventional fear of death -- that Death simply adopted a different tactic by eroding meaning.

How do we get around that one? Unless *we* do something to transform death itself, it seems that it is indeed the Last Word in meaninglessness. Death, where is thy sting? That's where, pal, in its pretensions to absolute nihilism. It is the anti-Word.

Obviously, getting around Death isn't something we could ever do. We can try, but then we simply end up looking like Cher, or Kenny Rogers. Entropy gets us all in the end.

However, what -- or who -- is God but the Great Negentropic Attractor?

If man has a "spiritual" conversion, you might say that God has an "anthropic" one. That is, as man turns to God, God apparently turns to man: "God becomes man that man might become God." So, not only does God die, but he must die in order to undo Death.

Put it this way: physics mathsplains to us that order is parasitic on entropy. But Christian metaphysics tells us it's the other way around -- that entropy is parasitic on order.

Life becomes death that death might become Life. One hopes...

Churchill, God, and Baseball

We have an early appointment tomorrow (Wednesday), so there shall be no post. But this is today. Get on with it!

We left off with the idea that we are the measure of what we can understand; and that our understanding includes a nonlocal organ "which perceives, and at the same time confers existence upon, a reality of its own" (Corbin).

We compared this latter to the historical imagination. Coincidentally, for several months now I've been immersing myself in WinstonWorld, a remarkably expansive and imaginative place. Churchill wrote four volumes on the History of the English Speaking Peoples, ending at the threshold of WWI. He carried the story forward by writing five volumes on that little dispute, and then six more on its continuation in WWII.

My point is that he essentially imagined all of history and situated himself within it. Contrast this with the average lofo voter, whose historical horizons scarcely extend past the last meal and beyond the next. Or maybe you've never seen Watter's World.

Not only did he imagine history, but he assimilated it, such that it was woven into his very substance. Manchester says something to the effect that for Churchill, English history was more akin to what childhood memories are for you and I, or lunch for the lofo.

Here is the exact passage. I include it because I think it parallels what Corbin says about God and the imaginal space (emphases mine):

"Memorizing dates and place-names has always been the bane of schoolchildren." But "for a few," including Churchill, "history, by way of imagination and discipline, becomes part of personal memory, no less than childhood recollections of the first swim in the ocean or the first day of school."

"Churchill did not simply observe the historical continuum; he made himself part of it." The distant past, extending to Greco-Roman times, "informed his identity in much the same way" as did memories of his childhood home.

Even so, "He did not live in the past." Rather, "the past lived on in him." He had a "mystical relationship" with it, such that the present resonated with the past in a deeply personal way. You could say that this is how and why he recognized Hitler the moment he saw him: same play, new actor.

Yesterday we spoke of the distinction between history and memoir; a memoir, although "in" history, isn't history, in that the latter involves a more transcendental, comprehensive, and disinterested view. However, in a fascinating twist, it is as if Churchill transforms history into memoir -- as if it all happened to him personally.

Now, how might this help inform what we've been saying about the imaginal space?

Somewhere our Unknown Friend writes of the importance of imagining various events of the Bible -- is if intimately participating in them.

On a more banal level, I'm thinking of the great announcer of the Dodgers, Vin Scully, who will be retiring this week after 67 years with the team. I've been listening to him since 1965, and it is difficult if not impossible to describe his magical ability to facilitate one's imaginative participation in the game.

Through the '60s and '70s in particular, few games were televised, so radio was the only option. But he made the games so vivid, that most everyone attending them held transistor radios to their heads, listening to Vin describe what they were seeing with their own eyes. In fact, you didn't even need a radio. There were so many, that you could hear his voice in the stands without one -- even on the field.

Again, this may strike one as a trivial example, but think of the implications: Scully's imaginative description of the game was somehow more real than the game itself; or, it revealed a deeper dimension of reality via one's personal participation in the imaginal.

By the way, the wife discovered a download of Vin reading the rosary. I am informed by an 11 year old witness that it made her cry -- just as he made me cry in 1966, when the Dodgers lost to the Orioles in the World Series, even though the eyes tell us it's just a bunch of grown men playing a child's game.

There is something similar going on with scripture. For example, "the story of Adam in Genesis" reflects "the invisible history of the 'celestial' and spiritual man, enacted in a time of its own and always 'in the present'" (Corbin). As with Churchill, the stage is the same, and even the roles; only the actors change.

We're almost out of time. Let's conclude by suggesting that "mere reality" is lacking a dimension or two, which can only be perceived via the imaginal. "Is it possible to to see without being in the place where one sees?" Imaginal visions "are in themselves penetrations into the world they see."

It's little like how a magnifying glass gathers the sun's rays into a focal point which burns through the surface.

You are the Problem

The problem with the gap between Friday and Monday isn't so much the gap itself but the frame of mind -- the state more than the content. Recovering the content is easy enough, but more important is figuring out where -- or who -- I was when I wrote it. Now, where was I? And who?

Right. Recipherment and decipherment (bearing in mind that a cipher is nothing). So we're halfway there, being that I feel completely re-ciphered, or freshly enzilched, this morning. As usual, lost in the bewilderness and searching for questions.

In the ultimate sense, it would appear that mysticism is to philosophy as form is to content. Corbin writes that "a philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation," while "a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray."

This truism finds perhaps its quintessential expression in St. Thomas, who, toward the end of his life, had a mystical experience compared to which all the prior philosophizing was nothing; no man has ever deciphered more than Thomas, and it seems that his re-cipherment was on the same scale.

But this is a cross-religious experience. Think, for example, of the Buddha, who, in realizing the poverty of speech in conveying the experience, simply held up a flower.

Now, if man is in the image of God, each man's image of God must be at least "relatively unique," being that each man is himself unique.

Imagine invisible light passing through a prism, only in this case, the prism reveals an infinite number of colors (which I suppose it does anyway, for it is we who place the boundaries between violet and blue or yellow and green). Bearing in mind what was said above, this implies that each man must not only know his God but realize him. In his own living color.

In short, God is revealed -- or reveals himself -- in a form to which each man is individually capable of seeing. To add biofuel to the living paradox, God is at each end of the enterprise, such that -- in the words of Meister Eckhart -- "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me."

What I've written so far probably seems either stupid or pointless. But I say: why can't it be both?

Buddhists also say something to the effect that another man's dharma -- AKA path -- is a grave danger. Or in other words, you can't take the journey for someone else, nor can they take it for you. Rather, you have to simultaneously find and forge your own path; and also imagine and discover where it leads.

Which does not devolve to a hopeless subjectivism, because the finding is no less important than the forging. It's an orthoparadox. Deal with it.

"Imagine" and "discover" would appear to exclude one another, but if so, then Corbin pretty much wasted his life in trying to explain how and why each necessitates the other.

Think of the relationship between DNA and environment. Even if DNA is the "code of life," it isn't Life Itself. It also codes for the environment, or better, for a kind of dialectic between the organism and the expected environment. The code for wings obviously anticipates the atmosphere in which they are operative. Likewise, the code for human intelligence anticipates truth, as the code for religiosity anticipates God.

There is empirical reality and there is intelligible reality; but there is also spiritual reality. Furthermore, our standard equipment includes the apparatus for knowing each, i.e., senses, reason, and... what? In other words, we can sense the physical world and reason about the intelligible. What is the equivalent activity vis-a-vis the spiritual?

"Imagination" is apparently the best word we have, although Corbin draws a sharp distinction between the imaginary and imaginal. Referring back to the forge/find dialectic, the imaginal takes place in the space in between, whereas the imaginary would imply no real discovery (or discovery of the Real).

In order to imagine the imaginal, think of the analogy of "historical imagination." Obviously, history is only something that can be imagined, but that hardly means it didn't occur.

Rather, too much occurred for any man to ever fully imagine. So, history is always one man's representation of what occurred. And there are capacious historical imaginations, just as there are narrow or shallow ones. There are inevitable scotomas, not to mention perspectives and dimensions.

For example, one could write a history from the perspective of economics, of religion, of science, of liberty; or from the standpoint of women, or slaves, or children. No one could possibly see everything from all possible perspectives.

The other day I was explaining to the boy the difference between history and memoir. To back up a bit, I'm trying to find a way to get him interested in history. I read quite a bit about World War II, but I was thinking that perhaps an eye-witness memoir of a soldier on the ground might better capture his imagination.

Odd, isn't it, that being an eye-witness to history is not the same as history? But nor is being an eye-witness to "religious facts" the same as religion.

Corbin cites the example of the Burning Bush, which "is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs." Likewise, in the absence of a "trans-sensory" organ, the Crucifixion is just some rabble rouser getting the death penalty. Nothing about religion makes a great deal of sense if not transmuted by this organ of perception.

I read somewhere yesterday that Trump's detractors take him literally but not seriously, whereas his followers take him seriously but not literally. Scott Adams said something similar this morning, that Trump

always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading.

This reminds me of some of Jesus's more extremist statements about selling all one has and giving it to the poor, or hating one's parents, or returning love for hate. I don't know about you, but I take such statements deadly seriously if not always literally.

Let's say Jesus is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. The senses would say "I don't see it," while logic might respond, "so what?" You might say that the whole thing is a stumbling block to the senses and folly to our reason.

"Abstract monotheism and literalist religion do not suffice to permit an effective divine encounter." Rather, we need something like "active imagination," which is "that organ of prophetic inspiration which perceives, and at the same time confers existence upon, a reality of its own" (Corbin).

Moreover, "each man is the measure of what he can understand" (ibid.). Or, each of us is an imaginal space for God's self-understanding -- where the divine light is refracted through a unique problem which you call I and others call You.

Deciphering and Re-ciphering the Mystery

Back to Polanyi for a moment, who was a critic of the notion that "true knowledge must be something detached and utterly objective," and that science alone is capable of meeting these criteria" (Prosch).

Rather -- as we've been discussing vis-a-vis al-'Arabi -- "World views are imaginative projections" and "are not products themselves of scientific investigations" (ibid.).

Indeed, a world view implies both perspective -- and therefore lack of objectivity -- and participation. Imagine trying to see the room where you are sitting from all possible perspectives. Then throw in all possible subjects, including the ant now crawling up my leg. Now consider something larger -- history, or the cosmos, or God. As I mentioned the other day, such things can only be imaginatively envisioned.

I believe I've mentioned before that when I read a good history book, it is as if a previously unnoticed scotoma is filled in. A scotoma is a blind spot where, for example, the optic nerve connects to the eyeball. This produces a "hole" in the field of vision of each eye, which our brains don't notice. But if you stare straight ahead while moving an object at the periphery, there is a point at which it disappears.

I see that the wiki article includes a section on neuropsychological, psychological, and intellectual scotomas. To which we might add historical and spiritual:

"The common theme of all the figurative senses is of a gap... in the mind's perception, cognition, or world view." And "in psychology, scotoma can refer to a person's inability to perceive personality traits in themselves that are obvious to others.... [A]t the highest abstraction level are what have been called intellectual scotomas, in which a person cannot perceive distortions in their world view that are obvious to others."

This concept of psycho-pneumatic scotomas is full of implications. The most important scotoma of all, as we've been saying in recent posts, is God. How is that? Well, recall what was said a couple of posts back about how "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." I would say that this High Incomprehension is actually an accurate perception of the ontological scotoma at the heart of existence -- or in other words, of our radical incompleteness.

And yet, reality itself cannot be "incomplete." That would be an absurdity. Therefore, our ontological scʘtʘma is, as it were, a "placeholder" we fill with God. Conversely, you might say that the atheist simply papers over the hole, filling it with "matter" or "math" or "natural selection," or whatever. But thank God for that hole in the ground of being, without which we would be sadly complete.

Come to think of it, Gödel's theorems certainly go to this. For example, if you imagine that your scientific theory is somehow "complete," it is only because you are overlooking the Gödelian hole at its center -- i.e., the metaphysical assumption(s) for which the theory cannot account.

It is simply a truism that knowledge of God begins and ends in Not Knowing, if only because the finite can never contain the infinite. Yes, the finite can represent the infinite, but we must never forget the scotomatous abyss between the two.

Analogously, what is the "space" between a circle and a sphere? Think of the old gag to the effect that God is as close to you as your jugular vein. Likewise, from the perspective of the circle, the sphere couldn't be any closer, since the latter contains an infinite number of circles. And yet, there is nevertheless an unquantifiable abyss between circle and sphere -- a dimensional scotoma, so to speak.

To change if not grind our gears for a moment, this also applies to our politics. Our founders, for example, were quite careful to create a system of negative liberties, and what is a negative liberty but a kind of empty space free from government intrusion? Thankfully there is a big nothing at the very heart of the American ideal.

Unless you are a liberal, in which case you wish to eliminate the Nothing with an infinite number of laws, regulations, speech codes, and political correctness, right down to the most intimate behavior. And I use the term "infinite" advisedly, because there is no limiting principle to the ever-growing regulatory state cherished by liberals.

It is vital to understand that "negative liberty" is inconceivable -- or at least unworkable -- in the absence of "positive obligations." As we've said before, only a person who is a priori responsible is fit for liberty. One thing -- the most important thing -- an American education should do is help form responsible citizens who are fit for -- i.e., can tolerate -- negative liberty.

How's that working out? You will have noticed that the whole catastrophe comes down to those who can tolerate the scotoma of responsible negative liberty vs. those who want to empower the state to make it go away.

Think of "scientific Marxism." No scotomas there! It only explains everything, with no gaps or mysteries. Likewise scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, or any other ideology. To paraphrase Arthur Koestler, these are men without umbilical cords grounding them to the Womb of Being.

This is all by way of a meandering prelude to a discussion of Henry Corbin, who writes of "a plane of consciousness distinct from that of rational evidence; it is the 'cipher' of a mystery, the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way." (Cipher: a zero; a figure O.)

You might compare it to the circle and sphere alluded to above. The symbol is to God as circle is to sphere: it is "never 'explained' once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again, just as a musical score is never deciphered once and for all, but calls for ever new execution."

So, you might say that the metabolism of God involves a never-ending re-cipherment for the purposes of de-cipherment. Because again, no number of circles will ever fill up the sphere, let alone that Sphere.

The Waystation Between Must Be and Can't Be

There are three sorts of existence: there is Necessary Being, "which cannot not be." Then there are things that cannot be under any circumstances: necessary not-being, you might say, or just plain impossibility (although the Cubs are posing a challenge to that one). Then there is the realm of the Possible, of things that might or might not be. That would include you and I, "whose relationship to existence and nonexistence is equal."

D'oh! This means that we always have one foot in existence and another on a banana peel. It is what makes life so... bracing. We are situated smack dab between Must Be and Can't Be, so there is an inherent degree of absurdity, or at least ambiguity.

To choose atheism or scientism or existentialism is to essentially say we are either children of the Can't Be or an extension of the Must Be. If the former, then our lives are indeed absurd and nothing more. And if we have no free will, then it is as if everything is preordained, and we Must Be who and what we are.

It seems that people are uncomfortable with the ambiguity and enigma of the Possible. One immediate implication is that there is a lot of Luck involved. Why did that white guy in Charlotte get dragged from his car last night and brutalized by the rioting savages? Wrong place at the wrong time. Bad luck.

I'm thinking of Curtis Mayfield, who was just standing on stage at an outdoor concert when a lighting scaffold blew over and crashed down on him, breaking his neck and rendering him quadriplegic. A couple of years ago an enormous tree broke in half and crashed into my back yard. If anyone had been standing there, it would have killed him. Who knows how many close calls we have in a given day? We generally only know about the bad things that happen, but not all the near misses.

The point is, we are always perched between existence and nonexistence, and although we can take precautions, there is nevertheless an element of randomness we can't eliminate. If we could, then we would be in the realm of necessity, not possibility.

In fact, for Schuon, God's All-Possibility is the whole explanation of evil. Evil is something that ought not be, but is nevertheless possible. What Schuon would say is that God doesn't will evil, of course, only possibility. But possibility includes the negation of God's will, hence, evil.

"Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil; seen from this angle, what we term evil is thus indirectly a result of Infinitude, hence of the Divine Nature..."

Therefore, "The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence." Haters gonna hate, and all that.

This latter goes to man's fallen nature (or to the tragic vision of life, if you prefer), and it is precisely this Lamentable Fact that the liberal denies (c.f., Sowell's A Conflist of Visions and Vision of the Anointed).

So, the world is a tapestry of necessity and contingency, which is precisely what makes it the world. If not for the contingency, it would be heaven. Schuon says somewhere that it is also product of geometry and music; and what is architecture but frozen music, and music but flowing architecture?

This means that to perceive reality we must, as it were, see the geometry and hear the music. In a certain sense, science is about the former, art and religion the latter. But there is also a kind of intuitive hearing in science, and a kind of hierarchical structure in God.

Now, one of the purposes of religion is to render us more "real" by participating in the Real -- in Necessary Being. In our own way, we participate in Necessary Being simply by virtue of our uniqueness: "each human being is a unique reflection of God, since 'Self-disclosure never repeats itself.'"

So, on the one hand, we might or might not have been; but once we are, then there can be no repetition. Our "true self" -- or soul -- must be a kind of fragment of Cosmic Necessity, of the Divine I AM, but again, woven with contingency.

And "man is not man until he brings the divine attributes latent within himself into actuality." But most people -- you will have noticed -- are closer to "animal man," or "animals in human form, since they have not actualized the divine form which would make them human."

So, it appears that the human station is the very possibility of participating in human being or in non-being: your call. If you've never met a human non-being, then you need to get out of the house more often. Or just turn on the news.

"'Animal man' is the opposite of perfect man," whether the latter is limited to Jesus or is widened out to encompass the saints. From my perspective, I think the saints "participate" in Jesus, hence the (relative) perfection.

Jesus is "the way," but also the "waystation." For "A 'waystation' is a station to which God descends to you, or within which you alight upon Him.... He desires to descend to you and places within your heart a seeking to alight upon Him" -- the old (⇅).

Well, that's about the size of it.

Round About the Queer God

For any curious human being -- and a human without curiosity is scarcely worthy of the name -- the existence of God is the Question of questions. But merely answering the question in the affirmative is insufficient. Rather, "having answered it," writes Chittick, human beings "must then set out to verify the truth of their answer by finding God in fact, not in theory."

This is precisely what we mean by (k) vs. (n): our "main concern is not with the mental concept of being [k] but with the experience [n] of God's Being," whereby "finding," "perceiving" and "being" are united in "that which truly is."

This constitutes what we call the Bewilderness Adventure: "To find God is to fall into bewilderment, not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one's way, but the bewilderment of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and not-knowing Him at the same time."

You could say that (k) is mere knowledge, the sort of thing that can be easily passed from mind to mind. But (n) requires a wide-I'd state of blunderment, in which we first empty ourselves of what we know in order to make room for what we don't.

Thus the orthoparadox: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." So, be wary of those who only know. As the saying goes, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

A gag by Kierkegaard just popped into my head, so perhaps it is relevant: "Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the culture around us." Conversely, imagine if the gospel were as assimilable as any other form of (k). In the end, it would render us equal, if not superior, to God, because it would mean we could contain him (rather than vice versa).

Indeed, the fact that we can know God but never contain him is guaranteed to generate an endless stream of partial answers -- as no amount of two-dimensional circles can add up to the three-dimensional sphere. Thus, our answers can and will be completely true and yet utterly false. To tweak a famous saying, "Why do you call it truth? There is no one true but God allone."

Any extreme seeker knows that "the answer to every significant question concerning God and the world is 'Yes and no.'" Whatever Yes you can come up with simply isn't big enough for God. Indeed, there are certain gods so puny -- and you know who they are -- that the No! is far preferable to any Yes. Saying Yes to them would be an insult to God and man. Give me an honest naytheist to a narrow-minded yeatheist.

"'Finding,' it needs to be repeated, is never just epistemological. It is fundamentally ontological. Being precedes knowledge knowledge in God as in the world" (ibid.).

In God, of course, knowledge is Being, and vice versa; in giving existence to the world, God literally gives being, but this being is at the same time not-being. If you don't know that, then death is here to remind you. You might say that the purpose of religion is to bridge that otherwise unbridgeable gap between being and Being.

And when I say "unbridgeable," I mean of course from our end: again, we can never contain the Container. But "what if" -- "I'm just thinking out loud here," said God -- "what if the Container were somehow to become the content?" What if the Timeless were to enter time, the Infinite the finite, the Author his story? Wouldn't that be a kick in the godhead?

To paraphrase the early Fathers, The Container becomes contained so that the contained might become Container.

Is any God-spiel down here adequate to accomplish this? If so, it would have to be a strange spiel indeed, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

"None knows God but God." True enough, even self-evidently so. And if not for the Incarnation, it would be an impenetrable tautology.

But as a human individual who has come into existence and then returned to his Creator, he has tied together the Origin and the Return.... He is the part and the Whole, the many and the One, the small and the Great, everything and All. Just as he turns round about God, so the cosmos turns round about him. --William Chittick

Seeing the Light in our Prismhouse

We are in the process of cross-referencing some insights from a celebrated 13th century Sufi Cosmonaught with everything else we know to be true of reality. Why? Because it is always intriguing when people separated by centuries, cultures, languages, and religions nevertheless perceive the same invisible things. For me, anyway.

Perhaps it's fundamentally no different than two explorers -- say, Vikings and Spaniards -- discovering the same land mass. Of course there will be differences, since Newfoundland is not central America. Nevertheless, it's a Place, and in any event, the Place wasn't Europe. Same with nonlocal/vertical reality: it is quite diverse, despite the underlying unity (same house, many mansions).

Indeed, al-'Arabi is Allahbout describing that place: it is "the realm where invisible realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. Though more real and 'subtle' than the physical world, the World of Imagination is less real and 'denser' than the spiritual world, which remains forever invisible as such."

You might say that, just as the material world is transmuted through our senses into a ponderable reality, so too is the spiritual world transmuted through the imaginal into the world of religion. As they say, water takes on the color of its container. Compare pure spirit to invisible water, and religious imagery its container: different colors, same water.

I was thinking about this yesterday; or rather, vice versa, since the thought just popped unbidden into my noggin. But we use the word "reality" rather loosely. Reality is one thing, our ideas about it another. Is any human idea actually adequate to reality? Clearly not. Rather, reality is something we can only imagine -- even when we use scientific concepts to do so.

A critical point, however, is that this is not to be confused with a Kantian dualism that denies us access to reality. For Kant, we are essentially trapped in the phenomenal representations of our nervous system, with no access to the noumenal-Real. Our esteemed Shaykh would insist that we do indeed have access to the noumenal via imaginal representations of it.

Go back to what was said above about the place where invisible realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. In particular, think of how we inevitably "spiritualize" reality.

For example, most people, in the presence of virgin nature -- the ocean, rivers, forests, mountains, etc. -- don't just see H20, or trees, or a pile of dirt. Somehow it is transmuted into a spiritual perception -- or perception of spirit -- such that a kind of metaphysical light shines through. This is another thing no artificial intelligence would be able to accomplish, whereas for humans it is hard not to accomplish it.

Note that there must be a difference between "spirit" and the thing it is clothed in, e.g., the river or mountain. This again goes to the idea of spirit taking on the color of its container. We don't reduce water to its container; nevertheless, we couldn't see it without the container. (Perhaps a better analogy is invisible light through a prism.)

Now, shift gears and apply the same principle to the upper vertical. It is pervaded by the same invisible spirit, but how do we capture it? The customary way is through religious containers, e.g., myths, symbols, icons, archetypes, commandments, etc. These are how we "clothe God" (or the sacred), so to speak.

This is an idea that is present in all religions. What distinguishes Christianity is that God literally clothes himself in man, a man who then becomes the "way" to think about God.

In what we might call Primordial Religion, there are three great Revelations. There is existence as such, which is transparent to the Light alluded to above. There is also revelation proper, the book or prophet who speak for God.

For Schuon, there is also the human intellect, which can have no sufficient reason outside God. In other words, nothing short of God can account for a Reason that so transcends everything under its purview. Just as the Light shines through matter and through written revelation, so too does the same Light shine on and through the intellect-nous.

This happens in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways. For example, in the Churchill bio there are many extracts of his prose, and there is something magically luminous about it. I don't know how he does it, but it just rolls out of him. Well, go back to the Light and the Container. I can't help thinking that the key lies in his contact with the Light, which then becomes clothed in his words.

It is very, very different from mere intellectualism. Indeed, Churchill was not an intellectual, in the sense of being interested in abstract ideas. Likewise, he preferred short and common words, and plain meaning. But there is no doubt that these words stirred a civilization to defend itself from a barbarous darkness that nearly succeeded in extinguishing it. Some how he "spoke" on behalf of the very Light for which Western Civilization is the container.

If this sounds like hero-worship, well, yes.

Conversely, think of how his anti-type, Hitler, did the same thing. He too clothed an invisible reality in powerful language. But what a difference! Hitler is truly "darkness visible," the lower vertical incarnate. And wouldn't it be nice if he were the only person capable of clothing "luminous darkness" in speech. Fat chance.

In any event, "imaginal existence allows abstract meanings to take on concrete form," whether that form is in matter or in the intellect.

Now, the radiation of spirit is closely tied to the presence of "openings." Or, spirit is always there; it is up to us to create the opening. It is "a near synonym for several other terms, such as unveiling, tasting, witnessing, divine effusion, divine self-disclosure, and insight." Each "designates a mode of gaining direct knowledge of God" which "comes to the aspirant suddenly [?!] after he has been waiting patiently at the door.'

To paraphrase Woody Allen, 90% of life is just showing up. In this case, you have to be there for the Light to break through. You don't necessarily have to do anything in particular, and indeed, there is nothing you could do on your end to force it to happen. However, there are a lot of things you can not do which will allow it to happen. Which is precisely what we mean by the "bewilderness adventure of higher non doodling."

Having said that, one must always coonsider the Source. I just left a comment on yesterday's post about Schuon's critique of what he calls "realizationism," which essentially involves a lack of discernment of the spirits to which one has opened. Spirit is neither here nor there; or rather, both here and there, i.e., up and down.

How to tell the difference? We're almost out of time, but al-'Arabi suggests that one test involves -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- the unity, or integrity, or harmony, or interconnectedness of it all. It should all Make Sense in a higher and deeper context.

Think of, say, St. Thomas vs. secular scientism. Both "explain everything," but the latter only does so by first explaining away everything that matters.

Imagining Reality

One thing leads to anauthor, in this case, Henry Corbin to Ibn al-'Arabi via William Chittick's The Sufi Path of Knowledge. I'm as dubious of Islam as the next guy, but there are always exceptions, most notably Schuon, whom I probably quote more than any other author.

Indeed, it is fair to say I that am far closer to a Schuon-style Sufism than to certain strands of moonstream Christianity -- just as if Lena Dunham were the only alternative, I don't know that I could call myself heterosexual.

Nor was Schuon himself without the same ambivalence: "Formerly, the prince of darkness fought against religions above all from without and apart from the sinful nature of man; in our age he adds a new stratagem to this struggle, with regard to emphasis at least, which consists of seizing religions from within, and he has largely succeeded, in the world of Islam as well as the worlds of Judaism and Christianity."

After all, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama call themselves Christian (as Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry are "Catholic"), and some 75% of Jews are reliable Democratic voters. All of these trends should be "impossible," but, as Schuon would say, evil is the possibility of impossibility (or presence of nothingness), so to speak. Some things cannot -- or at least should not -- be, and yet, there they Are.

In any event, this satanic ruse "is not even very difficult for him... given the prodigious lack of discernment that characterizes the humanity of our epoch..." This absence of discernment is precisely what renders the impossible possible and gives it the appearance of reality.

Speaking of possible impossibilities, I am currently reading volume 2 of Manchester's magnificent Churchill bio. It is rather more slow moving than the first and third volumes (which I have already read), and provides an almost hour-by-hour (and sometimes minute-by-minute) account of the three year lead up to World War II, from Hitler's 1936 yoinking of the Rhineland to his 1939 invasion of Poland.

While historians tell us World War II broke out in August of 1939, in actuality it started no later than 1936. It's just that the allies finally acknowledged it in 1939. Why did they (excepting Churchill) fail to notice they were at war before then? Well, why does the left not acknowledge that we are at war with Islamic terror? Rather, we are in a Narrative Fight with folks who call themselves Muslim. My narrative can beat up your narrative!

But you can't actually even say that, because the whole idea of narrative comes out of a subreal literary theory that says one narrative is no better than another, and that they are all rooted in power, not truth. Thus, just as the P. of D. seizes religions from within, so too does he seize English, history, philosophy, and psychology departments, not to mention political parties, TV stations, and newspapers.

I see we've already opened a multitude of possible avenues to explore in this post. I hadn't intended to veer off into Churchill, but my main point is the singular lack of discernment -- blindness, really -- in his opponents in the 1930s.

Conversely, Hitler wasn't at all blind, at least insofar as he saw exactly what he wanted to do and how to go about doing it. But just as liberals today blind themselves to troubling aspects of Islam, intellectuals of the 1930s skimmed right past the, er, troubling parts of the Mein Kampf narrative.

In comparing attitudes of the 1930s to contemporary times, the parallels are even more striking than I had realized. For example, liberals don't want to refer to terrorists as "Islamic" for fear of offending them. Just so, the whole policy of the Chamberlain government revolved around not angering Hitler.

Bear in mind that this was before "appeasement" had been discredited -- before it became a pejorative term. Rather, Chamberlain openly and enthusiastically embraced the policy of appeasement -- which is why the last thing he wanted to do was bring Churchill into the government, as this would have undoubtedly made the Fuhrer "cross." The logic is the same: just as angering terrorists creates more of them, Churchill was the Nazi's best recruiting tool.

But let's get back to matters at hand, al-'Arabi. I can't say I would recommend the book. Rather, I'm only here to extract the useful and throw away the rest. And the main thing I find useful is cross-referencing some of his insights and experiences with people like Meister Eckhart, who popped into history a little bit later (he was born about 20 years after al-'Arabi died in the 13th century).

Is it possible that those two had a common Source? Yes, I believe so, but nothing "exterior." Rather, it seems to me that they were orbiting around the same Attractor, and therefore seeing and experiencing some of the same things. You could say they were battling for the same Narrative.

I'm not going to pretend to be any kind of expert, nor to give any kind of tidy summary (which is impossible anyway, since he wrote some "700 books, treatises, and collections of poetry." You could say that he stood knee-deep in O with the firehose on full blast -- a ceaseless torrent of mystical insights. And as is always true in such cases, it is left to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Shifting gears rather violently for the moment, Churchill was the same way, at least in regard to his writing. The spigot was always on. Lately I've been trying to figure out the peculiar power of his words. What's his trick? Whence the magic?

Of note, one of the reasons he was ignored in the 1930s is that everyone acknowledged his "genius." It was his judgment they questioned. In short, it was widely believed that his prudence was not equal to his intelligence, such that there was an awful lot of indiscriminate balderdash tossed into the undeniably brilliant mix.

Which is sometimes true. You might say, the bigger the genius, the greater the error. One of his defenders said "Winston was often right. But when he was wrong -- well, my God.”

I think the "problem," if it can be defined as such, was his prodigious imagination. Now, as we've been discussing lately, reality takes place in the imaginal space between world and soul. Imaginal is not the same as imagination, but they certainly share similarities. Which we will no doubt get to as we proceed, because this is one of al-'Arabi's (and Henry Corbin's) central ideas.

This unruly post just refuses to settle down!

Let me begin with some highlighted passages from Chittick's introduction:

"Many important thinkers have concluded that the West never should have abandoned certain teachings about reality which it shared with the East.... In putting complete faith in reason, the West forgot that imagination opens up the soul to certain possibilities of perceiving and understanding not available to the rational mind."

Analysis: true. I entered western Christianity via the eastern door, and found there everything I had been looking for in yoga, only in a different garb, AKA veil.

At any rate, "Once we lose sight of the imaginal nature of certain realities, the true import of a great body of mythic and religious teachings slips from our grasp."

Speaking of which, in my ongoing effort to understand the Churchill magic, I'm reading his sprawling History of the English Speaking Peoples. In it he discusses the legendary Arthur, who may be imaginary but is none the less real for being so: he "takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance." There he "looms, large, uncertain, dim but glittering," such that "around his name and deeds shine all that romance and poetry can bestow."

Not to push the envelope too far, but what was Churchill but a modern-day incarnation of this same mythic and quintessentially British archetype? Certainly he was the only man in 1940 capable of pulling the imaginal sword from the stone of modern sophistication, and wielding it to rouse dreams and visions of light conquering darkness and good vanquishing evil.

Well, we're out of time. To be continued...

Homo Bangians and the New World

"With the advent of man," says Polanyi, "a whole new world of meanings burst into view." Absent this extraordinary Bang, it would be as if the others -- e.g., existence and life -- had never occurred. Certainly the latter two wouldn't mean anything. And in fact, nor do we Homo bangians mean anything unless we are converging upon the Singularity of singularities, AKA the Great Attractor.

A whole new world of meanings. What is the nature of this world? It is not merely the exterior world, for no meaning occurs there. Nor is it just the interior world, because with no anchor in reality, it is reduced to a dream. Rather, meaning takes place in the space between world and neurology, or between a ponderable exterior and pondering interior.

This world can only be known through personal participation; or just say persons. "Knowing of any sort," writes Prosch, "is the creation of a meaningful integration of subsidiary clues, dwelt in as a projection toward the achievement of a focally known whole -- even in the cases of perceptual objects of the sciences."

In other words, human perception is already the meaningful creation of an integrated whole. It is what humans do. In thinking about this, it must converge upon our mysterious ability to know universals. Almost as soon as we begin speaking, we are able to, for example, abstract dogginess from the dog or treeness from the tree. In other words, we organize the clues of this world into more abstract, universal, and meaningful categories.

"Perception does this, ordinary knowing does this, scientific knowing does this, poetry does this, religion does this."

Or in other words, we may regard knowing itself -- already an abstraction -- and appreciate an even deeper abstraction that unifies all its forms, from everyday perception to science to religion. If this is true, then "knowing the world" cannot be fundamentally different from "knowing God." Or, the data are different but the form is the same.

In a way, we already know this; for example, bio-logy is applying our reason to the data of life, as theo-logy is applying our reason to the data of God. Whether we are investigating bios, anthropos, or psyche, it is the same -logos that illuminates each.

Polanyi speaks of "conversion" from one worldview to another. While it applies to religion, the religious conversion represents a more universal phenomenon. Conversion as such "occurs when a person sees that a new world view would seem to open many more possibilities for a richer field of meaning than the one previously held" (Prosch).

This is why I conceptualize meaning as an attractor state in our psycho-pneumatic phase space. It is very much as if our minds are "pulled" into more stable attractors that integrate and harmonize more clues. This is very different from "imposing" meaning in a top-down manner, which always results in eliminating or obscuring important clues.

The latter involves a closed mind (and world), while the kind of exploration and discovery we're talking about requires openness and sensitivity to nonlocal (vertical) gravitational forces -- like surfing the invisible waves that flow between God and our local shores.

Speaking of gravitational forces, we are always "in the orbit" of God. In principle, thinking cannot occur without this attraction. Man is innately epistemophilic, meaning that he is a (the) truth-seeking being. No, he is the truth-loving being, hence the seeking. This accounts for the palpable joy of finding truth: it is what we are made to do.

Like any properly serious truth-loving being, Polanyi "took Gödel's theorems very seriously." Indeed, if only people would take him seriously, not only could we avoid an awful lot of philosophical mischief, we might even find a cure for tenure in our lifetimes. For it is written:

"No conceptual system can ever demonstrate within its system its own consistency." Rather, "Belief is always based on personal, tacit grounds, extraneous to the system..."

This comes very close to describing Adam's sin. For what is the Original Error to which man is always susceptible? Surely it must be imagining that his manmade system is sufficient unto itself; that it is both consistent and complete, thus having no need for that which transcends it, AKA God.

Note how this inevitably causes man to go off the cosmic rails. Again, in order for there to be be thinking at all, it must take place in the attractor space between man and Absolute. Deny this link -- this vertical trailroad -- and man only orbits himself in an act of cosmic onanism.

What we call "religion" is simply conscious participation in this orbiting; among other things, it allows us to "bring together events occurring in nature with a Cause that is not in nature," thus respecting Gödel and not incidentally the second commandment, for thou shalt have no other theorems before Gödel's.