Precision Poetry and the Bill of Responsibilities

In the previous post we touched on the mystery of how subjectivity enters the cosmos and existence becomes experience -- or, existence starts to experience itself. It seems to me that as soon as one begins using words to describe this development, one is vulnerable to misleading and/or being misled.

For example, in the first sentence above, I alluded to subjectivity "entering" the cosmos. I then referenced existence "becoming" experience. Neither of these can be accurate; they are loaded with preconceptions that will lead us astray if simply followed blindly.

They are similar to the mind-matter dualism, which is just a conclusion masquerading as a premise. The one is defined in terms of the other, but neither is defined in terms of itself. In other words, to say "mind-matter" is a way to conceal the fact that one has no earthly idea what mind (or matter) is. The terms are just placeholders for certain properties.

Only metaphysics can rescue us from this linguistic rabbit hole of mirrors.

Yesterday afternoon the term popped into my head unbidden: precision poetry. That's all. Just "precision poetry." It then flew away, only to return just this moment. What could it mean?

Well, in my experience, it brings to mind exactly two people: Schuon the Metaphysician and Dávila the Aphorist. There are better poets and there are more precise thinkers, but no one else in my world combines the two in such a powerful way.

I'll give you a counter-example. I'm reading a book about a subject near my heart, called Into the Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Roots of 1960s Rock and Roll. Between the ages of, say, nine and twenty five, music was pretty much my religion, my savior, my point of reference. It was the only thing that made Total Sense to me -- and made sense of the world.

I'm sure we've discussed this in the past, but for me it was much more than merely "liking music." Rather, it was my gateway to ecstatic and mystical experience. In other words, daily lessons in transcendence. Given the routine experience of transcendence, the world couldn't possibly be reduced to its appearance. Flickering embers from the Other Side were scattered everywhere.

It also seems to me that I was more vulnerable than most to ecstasy -- which I mean literally, in the sense of ekstasis or "standing outside oneself." In turn, this contributed to my singular lack of ambition. I was never, ever lured by the rewards of a conventional life, because those rewards could never replace the intrinsic rewards of bare existence. For me, such a life would equate to death. (I should also emphasize that this can easily be confused with mere hedonism, another thing entirely.)

So, you can see why I was attracted to the title of this book. And while the author makes some good points, his language is so full of imprecise bloviating that it dulls the message. Frankly, this is the peril of any religious writing, especially before there is any canon or tradition within which to work.

Come to think of it, really productive religious writing must always navigate between two shores, dogma or doctrine on one side, and a kind of indistinct cloud on the other. Geometry and music. Default to the former, and language becomes dead and saturated; veer toward the other, and one is reduced to deepaking the chopra.

What is needed is... precision poetry. Here is an example of imprecise pseudo-poetry, or of Liking the Sound of One's Own Pen:

American children heard so much about this imaginary Britain that it was sometimes hard for them to tell as they grew up what were their real childhood memories and what came out of those stories. Without knowing it, their parents had initiated them into the British secret history.

Thus, when the Beatles arrived,

the American adolescents who responded to them already had a kind of interpretive framework with which to understand them. They instinctively understood that these young men, with their fascinating accents, their schoolboy hair, their air of cheeky panache, their dashing clothes, were not of the colorless present, but creatures of a story. They were envoys from the secret history....

They were a version of the protagonists of English children's stories, the ones who discovered phoenix eggs and secret gardens. The implicit idea was that childhood -- or certain things about childhood -- could become a way of life.

There may be a precise point or two buried somewhere within, but as the Aphorist might say: Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas. So, Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick.

Speaking of which, there is a particularly nauseating passage about the JFK assassination. If you want to be precise about it, he was killed by an unhinged leftist (but I repeat myself). End of story.

No no no. Here's the real story:

Something in the thousand days of Jack Kennedy put into the air a notion that a Kennedy America might be a place where the desires of the underground could be harmonized somehow with the desires of the country. Kennedy was, Norman Mailer said, a sheriff that the outlaws could respect. The idea of such an alliance of outlaws and sheriff was shattered by the assassination, never to recur.

Oof! I think I'm gonna hurl. It gets worse:

JFK had sometimes seemed like a presence that might graciously escort the country through the transformations that history was poised to rain down on it, to somehow manage it all -- a person who had one side of his head in the grace of the past and one side in the wild energy of the oncoming future. Now the people felt exposed to the fury of the storm.

That right there is some bad and imprecise poetry. And no, he wasn't just murdered by a leftist loon:

The consensus narrative was not able to comprehend the assassination.... The Commission's version of the story was finally not far enough from the id of America, the secret dark enflamed places where espionage, crime and reactionary violence [?!] crossed each other....

An impulse emerged, almost from the moment of the event, to see the assassination as part of a pattern, maybe an extension of the horrors coming regularly out of the South. It was American viciousness -- the spirit of the lynch mob -- seemingly carried to a sublimity of horror, the mask slipping from the awful face. A glimpse of the scale of the power that was keeping the country both placid and brutal.

Gosh. Why not just blame Trump and be done with it?

My point isn't to make you sick. I just wanted to again highlight the nauseating combination of obscure thought and bad poetry. To quote the Aphorist, Many a modern poem is obscure, not like a subtle text, but like a personal letter. As in, "What the hell is he talking about?"

Precision poetry is not only possible, it is necessary. This is because truth and beauty converge and are ultimately two sides of the same reality.

The other day it occurred to me that we really need a Bill of Responsibilities to complement our Bill of Rights. Indeed, the former must precede the latter, because only a responsible person can be given rights. Rights and responsibilities are grounded in free will, such that the free person has certain intrinsic rights only because he is presumed to be a morally responsible agent.

So, we have the "right to free speech." But this is only conceivable, let alone possible, because we have a prior responsibility to the Logos. In other words, we are obligated to speak truth. To bear false witness is not only wrong, it is cosmically irresponsible. It is to destroy the very reason why man was given speech at all. When you speak -- and write -- you have an obligation not only to be honest, but to at least try not to be ugly.

The writer arranges for syntax to return to thought the simplicity which words take away. And The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie. --Dávila

The First and Last Now

When you think about it, the center is as mysterious as the now. Einstein famously remarked that nothing in physics could account for the now. The google machine suggests that it even kept him up at night:

Einstein said the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man,something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. So he concluded 'that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science.'

Nevertheless, the article goes on to take a stab at a lame scientistic explanation. Despite its lameness, the author breathlessly enthuses that "Now is an exciting time. We are on the threshold of possibly understanding both now and the flow of time."

Einstein is correct: there is indeed something essential about the Now which is outside the realm of science (and that realm is not a small area, to put it mildly).

There is, and will never be, a scientific understanding of the now, or of time more generally. For that one needs recourse to metaphysics. Science is far too narrow to contain time, let alone eternity. And these two are complementary and mutually defining, at least from the human perspective. Time is a function, or mode, of eternity.

Let's think about the now. Each now is a kind of center, only located in time rather than space. However, it is also a spatial center; it has to be somewhere, and that somewhere is in each conscious subject. (To be conscious is very much to be conscious of the now, isn't it?)

We're really talking about three irreducible mysteries: Center, Now, and Subject. And these three are clearly related. As we've discussed many times, remove the subject from the cosmos, and there is no space or time, just everything everywhere at once. The first living subject was also the first center and the first now.

Let's enter the waaaaaayback machine and try to imagine the first now. As a matter of fact, this is something I attempted to do way back when writing the book of the same name: one "moment" the cosmos is (apparently) non-living; the next moment it is alive. What happened? What does this signify?

We all know there is a bright line between life and death. There must be an equally bright line between life and pre-life. Unless you believe the cosmos is a living organism, which makes a lot more sense than the belief that life is 100% reducible to the inanimate.

The first living thing is also the first subject: it is literally the mysterious emergence of an inside in what had theretofore been outsides only. Is an outside without an inside even conceivable? Not really. It's like an up without a down or left with no right.

In metaphysical hindsight (or better, downsight) we can see that the inside had to have been there all along. But using scientific categories only, we have to pretend the cosmos was all-outside until the emergence of that first itsy-bitsy subject some 4.5 billion years ago. That's when

a luminous fissure breaks open in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle, the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world, a wondrous strange mutation as unique, mysterious, and altogether surprising as our first bang into material space-time...

You could say that was the first rebellion and up-rising: we're not going to take it anymore! No more kowtowing to King Physics! We demand a biology department!

Interesting too that that was the last time radical equality existed in the cosmos. Pre-life, everything was truly equal. Nothing was above or below anything else. Without form, and as void as Nancy Pelosi's frontal cortex.

To continue plagiarizing with myself,

[P]ortions of the universe somehow declared their independence from the strict, physiochemical laws that had held matter in their death grip up to that time, and began exchanging energy and information with the "outside," so as to maintain and reproduce themselves through time. In setting up this dynamic exchange with the outside, the universe now had undeniable evidence of an "inside," with new, unprecedented categories of being, such as intention, perception, sensation, emotion, and eventually freedom, thought and moral and aesthetic judgment.

Put it this way: with Life, mere concrete EXISTENCE somehow becomes EXPERIENCE:

[A] new world literally came into being, outwardly dependent upon the previous one, but at the same time inwardly transcending it: a universe beyond itself, a restless declaration of subjectivity from the mute algorithms of opaque material repetition.

Etc. I had no intention of quoting myself ad such nauseam, but it still holds up. And always will. Not because of anything I personally figured out. God forbid! It's just the way it is, and you can't surpass what Is.

Let's climb down and refocus: Center, Subject, and Now. These are clearly related, or at least it is clear to me. But how? I mean, ultimately?

I would say that, just as subjects are inconceivable in the absence of the Divine Subject, nor are the Center and the Now conceivable without recourse to that same Subject.

"There is only one Center," writes Schuon, "but the phenomenon 'center' nonetheless exists in the spatial universe..." Sure does. I'm in one now. This is because our center is a projection, as it were, of the Center, or let us say the Principle of Centration. Every living thing embodies this principle:

"[T]he divine Center is necessarily reflected diversely in creation which by definition is the mirror of the Creator." Traces of this Center are every where and every when. Indeed, it is precisely why there are wheres and whens, which is to say, centers and nows.

"Wherever God is reflected, there is a center." This center is a presence -- or rather, presence as such -- and you would be far from wrong if you think of this in terms of Father <--> Son, or Being <--> Logos. I would turn it around and say that these points of reference are given us in order to think about this transtemporal Center-to-center and Now-to-now structure of things.

One cannot conceive of space without a center. What would space be without a center? Because we are the center, we can conceive of the space surrounding it. Likewise the now. Because it is now, we can conceive of the time surrounding us, of past and future. If there were no now, then the question would never arise.

So, the now is indeed a mystery. It is the only mystery, or one reflection of the Absolute Mystery that connects Subject, Center, and Now.

But it doesn't end there, because this Subject is a Person, not just an empty space, so to speak. And personhood brings with it such irreducible categories as freedom, creativity, truth, beauty, virtue, and relationship (the nonlocal touch of intersubjectivity). None of these are reducible to lifeless matter. Rather, they emanate from the top, and are reflected in the herebelow.

But you are always free to be cosmically stupid, in which case it is an exciting time, for you are always on the threshold of possibly understanding everything even while knowing nothing.

It all reminds me of something Petey once said, that yesterday is our birthday, today is our life, and tomorrow we are gone. So we have just one day to learn all we need to know, and that day is today. And that's enough.

Does Everything Evolve?

I used to believe it did, until I realized that change must be in reference to something changeless. If man is pure contingency, then he can know only the contingent (without even knowing it is contingent).

But every instance of real knowledge is "sponsored," so to speak, by a kind of implicit grasp of the Absolute. Without the Absolute, we would be submerged in a world of absolute relativism -- the impenetrable darkness of unrelenting tenure.

There are obvious instances of human knowledge that will never be surpassed, for example, pure math. But there is also a realm of "pure" morality that can never be surpassed. For example, it will never be moral to murder, or steal, or bear false witness (within the bounds of prudence, or practical wisdom).

There is also a political philosophy that can never be exceeded or bettered. That would be the philosophy enshrined in America's founding, whereby the purpose of the state is to protect our God-given natural rights.

Which is another reason why self-styled progressives are so ironically named: the right to free speech is infinitely -- literally -- more important than a so-callled right to not be triggered or offended by it.

Obvious, no? It's what the Fathers would call a "self-evident truth," being that it is more the product of vision than argument. Can you really argue with someone who wants to use free speech to eliminate it? Similarly, can you really argue about the second amendment with someone -- the state -- holding a gun at you?

"The principle of relativity," writes Schuon, "categorically demands the concurrence of the principle of absoluteness, on pain of giving rise to a chaotic and as it were 'headless' and atheistic cosmology."

Indeed, that is no cosmology at all, but rather, a chaology pure and simple, with no reason, purpose, orientation, direction, origin, center, coherence, unity, or any other attribute this side of an ignorant herd of black cows clashing by night.

The thing is, we can obviously never know the Absolute in any direct or fully comprehensible way. Among other reasons, this is because the Absolute is infinite, while we are not. In short, the finite can never contain the Infinite.

Nevertheless, the finite contains points of reference, so to speak, such that it may more than adequately map the Infinite (for human purposes). In short, man can actually know everything he needs to know about the Infinite, thanks to revelation. The rest is none of our business.

Here I want to insert a Most Excellent Quote that really etches into logos-bearing granite the principle we are discussing. It is universal, timeless, true, and therefore vital for you to assimilate if you are going to make even rudimentary sense of your human journey:

To affirm that there is a cosmos is to say that the latter necessarily includes within itself manifestations of that which it manifests by its existence (Schuon).

This is necessarily true by the force of logic: in knowing there is a cosmos -- which BTW we implicitly know with any coherent utterance of any kind -- we simultaneously (if implicitly) know its nonlocal source.

Or, put it this way: to even say "cosmos" is to have manifested the unity and coherence that transcend it. This is what it means to be in the image of the Creator. We are most assuredly not the Creator, but there are Points of Contact.

Now, these points of contact are obviously everywhere. Indeed, they are nothing less than every thing, if you know how to look. This is why every thing is intelligible, on pain of not being a thing. A thing is always an intelligible thing, or it is no-thing, precisely.

Nevertheless, this is not enough. I want to say that the creation is like a tree reflected in a lake, such that we see the leaves and branches before the trunk and roots. Man is in need of points of reference that reflect these latter, hence the sufficient reason of revelation proper (as opposed to the general revelation of sheer existence-from-being). Revelation is here to provide points of reference to the roots hidden beneath the divine ground.

That's how I see it, anyway. Revelation is not God, but rather, points back to God. It's like any other language: don't get hung up on the finger pointing to the moon. Rather, look at the moon.

And it goes without saying that more than one finger can point at the same moon. Indeed, the Infinite cannot be any single finger, which would be the very definition of idolatry. Idolatry is to invest one finger with infinitude, which is to give the finger to the Infinite.

Having said that, it is the central claim of Christianity that the Infinite does indeed incarnate as one finite man. But there are so many ways this can be misinterpreted that it required centuries for the Church to sort it out. And even then, it didn't so much sort it out as exclude interpretations that are total non-starters -- for example, that Jesus is all God or all man.

The takeaway is that in Jesus there are two natures in one person. Complicating matters is that one of these natures consists of three Persons (of the Trinity). You can only push words so far -- remember, they are only points of reference -- but this means that the one person Jesus is half one and and half three.

Does that make any sense? Er, I think so. At least to me. If these are all points of reference, to what are they referring? I can only say what I see, which is an eternal perichoretic dance between the O, 1, 2, and 3. You might even say it is spelled out below the icon in the sidebar, where it says that

The empty center is Beyond-Being. The circles are dimensions of Being. Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones.

"Beyond Being" is Eckhart's Godhead, the Ain Sof of Kabbalah, the Nirguna Brahman of Vedanta. However, I do not place this at the "top" of some vertical emanation.

Rather -- and this is just, like, my opinion, man, or better, vision -- it is always in complementarity with the Trinity. As such, not only are the Persons of the Trinity "relative" to one another, the Trinity is also eternally relative to the Ground. But to reiterate, the Ground is not chronologically or even ontologically prior. One is no less eternal than the other(s).

Is there any reason to believe any of this aside from Bob Sees It? Not really, unless you see it too, or because my points of reference happen to work equally well for you.

Back to the O, 1, 2, and 3; these are, respectively, Beyond-Being (and infinitude), Unity (and absoluteness), Relationship (love, knowledge, truth), and Synthesis. Taken together, I see them as perpetual Love-Truth-Creativity, always surpassing itself and yet orthoparadoxically unchanging. The Infinite Delight of Divine Plenitude Flowing from one shore to the other and

Just as God breaks through me, so do I break through God in return.... --Eckhart

So yes and no: everything and nothing evolves.

What Privilege

Worth repeating: the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone (Schuon).

Implicit in this statement is that our minds are attracted by and toward essentiality. Which is what? It is the nonlocal whatness of things. Animal intelligence can know that things are; but human intelligence is made to penetrate beneath thatness -- existence -- to whatness -- essence. Only humans are privileged to know the What of things.

No one knows how this is possible. No, check me on that; we do know how it is possible, but only with recourse to a trans-scientific, metaphysical foundation. Certainly science cannot explain how science is possible.

In this regard, it is difficult to say whether language is a cause or an effect, but either way, language is obviously central to the discernment of essences. It is like the shadow of essentiality. Not for nothing is it said that "In the beginning is the Word," yada yada.

Come to think if it, just as only human beings can know essences, only human beings can unknow or rebel against them. For example, we know that men are essentially men and women women. Indeed, this is why we have the words, the words following upon the essences. But what is the left but a rebellion against essentiality? We'll no doubt return to this subject... or maybe not, because the Aphorist can more than adequately summarize this diabolical inversion with just an astringent line or two:

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature [essence] in order to refrain from amending his own correctable [contingent] nature.

Boom! "I was born this way" is no defense for staying that way. It is the literal inversion of what Schuon says above, such that the rejection of essentiality compels man to remain landlocked on this shore, and to never set out for the other.

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

Inane if you're lucky, but usually tending toward the horizon of genocide. For ultimately, Humanity is the only totally false god (because, orthoparadoxially, we are the only essentially partial gods, so to speak).

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing. This reduces existence to a vapid monologue in the void, AKA tenure.

Which is why Authentic humanism is built upon the discernment of human insufficiency. Truly truly, in order to understand what you are, you must begin by understanding what you are not. Which is to say, the uncreated Absolute. In the absence of the latter category, you can only imagine yourself to be man -- man being unthinkable in the absence of its eternal complement God. The mirror is not God; and yet, it is "not other than God" either.

At any rate, only the human being knows of essences and therefore appearances, and vice versa. But human beings can never penetrate to the essence of essences, or the holiest of holies, short of self-extinction. There is always a Mystery at the heart of it all, not in the privative sense of ignorance, but in the sense of radiating, or sometimes exploding, presence. Not too little light. Too much. One sees the glowing footprints, and knows they aren't just hanging there suspended by nothing.

"[I]f Being and the first principles which flow from it are incapable of proof, it is because they have no need of proof; to prove them is at once useless and impossible, not through a lack, but through a superabundance of light" (Schuon). If one sees, one doesn't have to prove the existence of sight. Besides, how would you prove sight to one who is blind? Nevertheless, reason can disprove anything -- for example, free will -- but that hardly means it doesn't exist.

Proving what cannot be is insane, humanly speaking. These self-styled free-thinkers only end up freeing man from freedom itself. But you cannot transcend freedom, only sink beneath it. Yes, an ant is free of humanness, while the leftist never stops trying.

Augros asks an intriguing question, which is to say, how is it that we can have five separate senses but experience their transcendent unity in our selves? From where does this unity come? Indeed, to the five natural senses I would add our transnatural senses of the personhood of others, of beauty, of truth, and of the Divine Presence itSoph.

Each sense involves increasingly subtle degrees of touch. We know, for example, that something can "touch our heart." Likewise, to be truly understood by another person is to be touched. We can all "sense" grace, even if most people allow their vertical sense detector to harden or dissipate through nonuse.

"Taken by themselves, the external senses are like five unrelated voices. Together they cohere into your universal sense, they interrelate and become integrated. They harmonize."

To which I would add that the unity is always at the top; if it weren't there, we could never achieve it. It reminds me of a good stereo that is able to reproduce an accurate 3D soundstage. This is only because the sonic unity is prior to the stereo separation (into two speakers) that tries to recreate it.

The senses are complementary. Think, for example, of what humanness might be like if we only had four senses, excluding vision. We are able to teach braille to the blind by transforming what is seen into what is felt. The point is, the higher or more subtle dimension is able to reach down into the lower, but what is the likelihood that a world of blind humans could ever have come up with braille? Braille is a way for fingers to see, but someone first needs to see in order to put sight into the form of touch.

And this leads me to the notion that faith is a way for the intellect to see what it cannot see -- not the intellect in its essence, for intelligence can know anything knowable -- but due to various contingencies. Just as blindness is an accident and not an essence, so too is atheism. If blindness were an essence, then we couldn't teach braille to the blind.

Analogously, think of teaching sign language to lower primates. This can only go so far, because lower primates do not have the essence of speech, and cannot really know essences. I suppose that the brightest among them can penetrate a bit beneath the surface, but no ape will ever be as wrong about existence as your average professor.

Cosmic Extortion and the Drunkard's Search

Yesterday I was thinking about metaphysical Darwinism. (Would a strict Darwinian say that "Darwinism was thinking about me?"; for to think about it is to have transcended and thereby escaped it, which the theory would say is impossible.)

Or better, call it Darwinian literalism. Yes, it is an explanation of how we got here, but it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that it is only scientific. The literalist will no doubt respond: "Only scientific? As if mythology trumps fact and reason!"

Well, yes and no. It is, for example, an undeniable scientific fact that your body is roughly 50% water and that 99% of it is composed of six elements.

But what relevance does this have for your humanness? After all, it's only science. You can't treat a person like a chemical. For practical purposes our chemistry is of no consequence, any more than it matters what typeface is used in writing a book. Imagine a review that begins and ends with a sober analysis of the size and style of font. You'd think the person was an obsessive-compulsive nut.

Darwinian literalism "is the classic example of the bias that invents 'horizontal' causes because one does not wish to admit a 'vertical' dimension" (Schuon). Now, I wonder what is the motivation for this denial? Whatever it is, it is a passion; which is not necessarily problematic, except that in this case it is a passion for something other than Truth.

But Truth is the first priority and prime objective of our little adventure. If it becomes the first casualty then dreadful consequences follow, all the way up to extinction.

The extinction may or may not be physical -- in the previous post we spoke of Christian Science, which may redound to personal extinction if followed to the letter. But certainly soul death follows the rejection of truth -- or at least asphyxiation, dehydration, or starvation due to failure of pneumosynthesis.

Yes, pneumosynthesis. Good word. In fact, I'm a little surprised it isn't a word. I mean it by way of analogy to photosynthesis, which is a real word but no less mysterious. Photosynthesis "is a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that can later be released to fuel the organisms' activities."

Okay. "A process used by plants." So, what process did the plants use before using photosynthesis? I don't know. It's a long article, and rather technical.

The geological record indicates that this transforming event took place early in Earth's history, at least 2450–2320 million years ago, and, it is speculated, much earlier..... Available evidence from geobiological studies of Archean sedimentary rocks indicates that life existed 3500 million years ago, but the question of when oxygenic photosynthesis evolved is still unanswered.

When does one begin the study of biology? Fifth grade? I distinctly remember learning about photosynthesis, and the teacher telling us that science didn't actually understand how it works. Is this still true? In my opinion, no one will ever understand how sunlight is transformed to life. And what would it mean for practical purposes? That our thoughts are nothing more than transformations of solar energy? If so, then the theory of photosynthesis itself would be reducible to a chemical belch.

There is a kind of knowledge that paradoxically diminishes us with its increase. However, you can't really blame the knowledge. Rather, blame the metaphysic that conditions it -- in this case, the above-noted exclusion of verticality. What conditions the choice of metaphysic? Two possibilities: truth or preference. Which is to say, objectivity or subjectivity, reality or passion.

In the case of a solely horizontal metaphysic, "one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter" (Schuon).

Necessarily. Which is to say, objectively. Reality does not care about your feelings, even scientistic ones. Extortion is wrong. Using feelings to extort facts is the beginning of all mischief. You could even blame our primordial catastrophe (G3AOA) on it if you want to.

Scientists -- and we are speaking here of the scientistic type -- want to know, right? That's what they tell us, and we should believe them. But so too does the drunk man sincerely want to find his keys by searching for them under the streetlight. It's a real thing:

The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias that occurs when people are searching for something and look only where it is easiest. Another term for this is a drunkard's search.

So, the Darwinian literalist looks for man's origin where it is easiest, right under the scientistic streetlight. What makes this paradoxical -- or self-refuting, really -- is that light can only come from Light.

What I mean is that science incontestably furnishes light. But it only does so because of borrowed Light. If science is the light, then it is no light at all, and we are again reduced to cosmic indigestion -- a weird failure of entropy.

One reason I reread Schuon is that I always discover subtle points that may have been obscured by the bigger ones -- as in how the stars disappear in the presence of the sun, even though they may actually be exponentially larger. In this case, he writes that "the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone."

Mm mm mm. This mysterious little "sense of essentiality" turns out to be everything, humanly speaking. What does it mean? It means that human intelligence is defined by the ability to see beyond appearances to the reality behind or below or above them.

Ironically, this is precisely the mission not only of any science, but any rational human inquiry whatsoever, from history to psychology to literature. Obviously it is the mission of art as well, only in reverse: to create a surface for the audience to unpack. Both are fun! Which is to say, the encoding and decoding of mysteries. If you fail to engage in this -- well, let's just say you're missing out on a damn good thing.

Switching gears -- or books, rather -- Augros writes that "we must think that the human mind differs from the animal mind in some way as the infinite does from the finite."

Even that sentence proves the point, because it contains the word "infinite," or at least presents us with the humanly intelligible antinomy of finite <--> infinite, which transcends animality. But only infinitely.

We'll continue down this path tomorrow. Or up, rather, where the light is better.

Ramblers Gonna Ramble

More off-the-cuff rambling.

One of the -- if not the -- ultimate complementarities is subject and object. Indeed, these two seem to define one another, such that it is difficult to conceive of one without the other.

Can you imagine a world without subjects? No, of course not. Prior to 4 billion years ago -- or whenever life appeared -- there was nothing and no one there to perceive anything. There would only be everything everywhere at once, AKA nothing.

And what would a subject be without an object? Seems to me it would also be nothing, for subjectivity is always of, or toward, or with, or some other preposition. It seems to me that this sheds light on the nature of God, which is to say, Trinity, for the structure of Father-Son-Holy Spirit can be seen as Subject-Object-Relation.

This reminds me of something Hartshorne says -- that God is not only relative, but the most relative thing we can imagine. Indeed, he is the very foundation and possibility of Relationship. This is truly flipping the metaphysical script, because it implies that God actually IS what would appear to be impossible, which is to say, Absolute Relativity. Absolutely!

What else could it mean to say that "God is Love"? When I was a kid, my mother used to drag me to Christian Science Sunday school (up to about age nine or ten at the latest). No, it never took root, and proved ultimately to form an early lesson in why religion makes no sense. Certainly there was no way to integrate it with the other 6.9 days of the week.

In any event, I remember a podium, behind which gold letters spelled out GOD IS LOVE on the wall. No one ever explained why and how this could be so, certainly not on any satisfactory metaphysical basis (I'm not even sure if Christian Scientists believe in the Trinity; I don't remember ever hearing the word mentioned). Especially in a Christianized culture, it shouldn't take a man fifty years to begin to figure it out!

Now I'm curious. Let's check in with Prof. Wiki for just a moment. I promise not to get even more sidetracked than I already am. The movement is rooted in

philosophical idealism, a belief in the primacy of the mental world. Adherents believed that material phenomena were the result of mental states, a view expressed as "life is consciousness" and "God is mind." The supreme cause was referred to as Divine Mind, Truth, God, Love, Life, Spirit, Principle or Father–Mother, reflecting elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg and transcendentalism.

At the core of Eddy's theology is the view that the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that the material world, with its evil, sickness, and death, is an illusion.

Okay then. Ms. Eddy was a dyed-in-the-wool-pulling Gnostic (in the bad and intrinsically heretical way). Ah, here we go: her theology "is nontrinitarian; she viewed the Trinity as suggestive of polytheism." So she was a theological ignoramus as well. Not surprisingly, she "viewed God not as a person, but as 'All-in-all.'" Whatever that is. Seems like she conjured an indigestible brew of idealism and pantheism.

The whole thing was bound to confuse a child whose mother was a bit of a hypochondriac by proxy. What I mean is, despite all the "illness is an illusion" bit, she didn't hesitate to take me to the doctor if my temperature climbed to 98.7

You may be wondering how this heretical nonsense ever entered the Gagdad strain. Haven't I blogged about this before? There was a time -- maybe in the 1930s -- that Christian Science became quite a fad among Hollywood airheads, no doubt because of its non-conformist appeal. I mean, look at this list. It was like the New Age movement of its day, a pseudo-Christian way to deepak the chopra. Christian Scientology.

My maternal grandmother was a gold-plated eccentric who settled in Hollywood. From what I understand, she was hit by a bus or something, and had what she regarded as a miraculous healing due to the ministrations of a Christian Science practitioner. I'm not sure if she or my mother took it completely seriously, in the sense of living the faith.

But how could you? How can anyone consistently live as if the world is an illusion? You have to be able to live your faith in a consistent manner. But Christian Science ultimately forces you to think one way and behave in another. When it came to a choice between doctrine and reality, my mother always chose the latter, which is to say, medicine.

Here at One Cosmos -- hey, it's in the name -- we insist upon a total integration of horizontality and verticality, with no loose ends dangling from the cosmos area rug. We do not want to believe one way and act in another. We are not Cosmic Hypocrites, but completely consistent on every level of being. If not, then we correct it as soon as it is brought to our attention.

Let's get back to the idea that the world is an illusion. Well, duh! But an illusion is not a hallucination. The bus is not ultimate reality, but you still need to get out of the way if it is about to run you down.

The world is, as it were, a "side effect" of God. If you believe it is the cause rather than an effect, you are bound to chase this fairy tail forever. Scientific explorers "may well plunge into the mechanism of the physical world" and "undoubtedly meet with a variety of instructive insights into the structure of the physical categories..." (Schuon).

BUT: they will never reach the end of their trajectory, for the simple reason that there can be no end in that direction. Like the rays of the sun, they just go on "forever," more or less. Only by proceeding in the other direction can we locate the central source and principle.

Schuon begins with the axiom that "all knowledge by definition comprises a subject and an object." This self-evident natural trinity consists of intelligence-intelligible-knowledge.

This -- it seems to me -- is a kind of projection or prolongation of the heart of the trinity, revolving around Subject-Object-Spirit, this latter taking the form of love, truth, beauty, goodness, creativity, and transcendental unity. Furthermore, the middle term -- Object -- is actually a subject in his own right: he is object to the subject but subject to himself. All in a manner of speaking. Think of our world, in which other persons are objects but obviously subjects as well.

This sure goes back to the subject of Incarnation, doesn't it? "There is a chasm between ourselves and God that we cannot cross by our own powers." Thus, "if man is the bridge between the visible and invisible worlds, then Christ became human to repair that bridge" (White).

Recall what was said above about God being the most orthoparadoxically "relative" thing we can imagine: "Christ is in truth the most human of all of us. In short, God has become the most human of us all so as to reveal to us who God is in a most human way." Absolute Relationship becomes Relative Relationship, such that the latter can become the former.

Now, man is not just subject pure and simple; rather, there are layers, dimensions, and modes of subjectivity, hopefully with a degree of harmony and integration. For example, our senses are subjective. But materialists essentially pretend they have the last word on What Is. However, the senses don't really "say" anything. Rather, they are purely receptive. It is up to the intelligence to weave them into something higher.

Likewise rationalists. Yes, the world is rational, but not only rational; it can by no means be enclosed in the categories of reason on pain of immediately devolving to irrationalism. It comes down to the question of whether reason is an instrument of the mind or vice versa. To believe the latter is to be enclosed in tautology.

There is reality and there is truth, but reality is always bigger. It is like the relation between being and knowledge. We can of course know being, but only God can encompass it with rooms and mansions to spare. He not only drew a circle on the face of the deep, but a sphere around the circle and a four-dimensional object around the sphere. Etc. No matter how high you go, he always goes one dimension higher. Just call it Beyond-Being and be done with it.

"The mechanism of the world," writes Schuon, "can be neither purely deterministic nor... purely arbitrary. In reality, the universe is a veil woven of necessity and freedom, or mathematical rigor and musical play." As such, "every phenomenon participates in these two principles, which amounts to saying that everything is situated in two apparently divergent but at bottom concordant dimensions..." (Schuon).

Everyone knows that music is a kind of math. What they fail to appreciate is the converse: that math is a kind of music. If it's just silent and static -- if it doesn't sing of the creation -- to hell with it.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. --G.H. Hardy

Anchored in a Cloud and Soaring Toward A Dream

Another rambling post. What can one do? It's a jungle in here, and some days the best you can do is hack away.

Instability. It is our lot. On this side of life we're always in critical condition. But don't worry -- you'll be stable when you're dead.

Well, not really, if you believe, as I do, in purgatory. But the point is that this instability isn't a bug but a feature having to do with the very essence of man.

Note that in the case of God, his existence and essence are one; or, his essence is to exist. That's real oneness, baby!

Conversely, man has to be the most irritatingly paradoxical creature in all of creation, being that our essence is to change. Or, to express it in terms of perfect nonsense, the point of life is to become oneself. We are condemned to transcendence, and the man who doesn't surpass himself sinks beneath himself, yada yada. You are a child of God, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

As to the reasons for the instability, "the human being is a kind of bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world" (White). The bridge is solid at both ends but spans over an abyss, such that the middle part has a great deal of sway; think of a suspension bridge made of flexible materials over deep ravine.

That's you, on the bridge. There is security at either end, but of very different orders. Both are rock, you might say, one physical, the other metaphysical. Both are solid-as. Only one is dumb-as.

"[M]an can tend upward -- ordering all things to the creator -- or downward into the exclusive pursuit and domination of visible, created things."

So in reality it is a vertical bridge, one end grounded in the Absolute, the other end grounded in... Actually, the other end isn't grounded per se. Rather, I would say that the Absolute radiates toward infinity, so the only thing holding the bridge up at the far end is the linear momentum of the Divine Plenitude tending outward toward nothingness; like an airplane, it only stays up because it's moving.

Think of a ray of light extending out from the sun -- or better, the Big Bang, which is of course still banging. From what? Or, more mysteriously, into what? No one has any idea. What is the leading edge of the bang? Can it really be exploding into, and surrounded by, "nothing"?

That is a different question, and it is unanswerable. As the politicians like to say when they are dodging a question, Let's talk about what we know.

What we know is that irrespective of whether the cosmos is "eternal" or had a beginning, it must have a vertical cause that is always present. It is this cause that extends down and out "forever," or has a tendency toward Nothingness without ever arriving there. It is like numbers; each number is a multiple of one (absoluteness), but they go on forever (infinitude).

In any event, for our purposes, the "tension inscribed within humans marks us with a deep spiritual restlessness and instability, since we cannot live rightly either as angels or mere nonrational animals" (emphasis mine). One can of course tend toward nonrational animality, but no one short a Stalin or Mao becomes a perfect leftist.

The absoluteness of God seems to be mirrored in the black velvet nescience of Death: "Human beings are marked simultaneously both by immortal longings and by the certainty of death."

Now, a total cosmic inversion results in Death being the only certainty, "God" being the illusory byproduct of our fear, uncertainty, instability, etc. In this regard, Nietzsche is "absolutely" correct, which is why he will always be the favorite philosopher of bright adolescent counter-revolutionaries of all ages. He was certainly mine!

Let me drag out my dogeared copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and recall what appealed to me back when I was a 30 year-old teen -- back when God spoiled everything, and I enjoyed the cheap omniscience of the dimestore atheist.

Can't find it. It isn't amongst the usual suspects. However, I looked up some quotes, and it is interesting how he is such a perfect mirror image, or inversion, of the truth, even using the identical language and images in some cases:

Become who you are!

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep -- into evil.

Bravo! He is Satan's Aphorist -- which, in a way, makes him second best. Heresy and orthoparadoxy aren't strangers but cousins. Or twins, even. To err is human. But to invert reality and call it truth is diabolical. Some beliefs must exist, even though they have no right to. This is the true meaning of "tolerance."

BTW, Schuon writes that "Of course, a mature man ought to be 'adult,' but he can be so otherwise than by plunging into forbidden abysses..." Granted, Friedrich is a genius. But just because he jumps off the cosmic bridge, does that mean you should?

Anyway, those two rocks -- our "immortal longings" and the "certainty of death" -- "form a crossroads between God and the whole material creation." There are attractors at each end -- O and Ø -- such that "the devil, in his revolt against the wisdom of God, seeks to wrestle humanity away from God..."

The image comes to mind of a tightrope walker, or maybe just a bicycle rider. In either case you are stable so long as you are moving, but unstable when at rest.

Interesting paradox there, in that complete stability results in utter instability. Oh well. That's life. No, literally: what is life but change-in-service-of-conservation? Speaking of which, what is conservatism but the proper recipe for collective life? "The art of progress," wrote Whitehead, "is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

Now we have to switch gears on our bike for a slightly different view of the same phenomena. Let's say God goes to the trouble of incarnating as man.

This changes (?!) everything, in that it now means the Center -- the Unmoved Mover -- is here among us. It is available in a way it never was before: indeed, they will call him Immanuel, which means "God with us" -- and withinus -- no longer just without us. The transcendent becomes immanent that the immanent my become transcendent; or, God becomes bridge that the bridge may actually get somewhere.

Reality and appearances. It seems that our bridge is somehow suspended between these, even though it isn't really possible to anchor anything in illusion. Nevertheless, the tenured have been explicitly attempting to do this ever since Kant, who suspends us, as it were, between the illusory and the unknowable, or between a dream at one end and a crowd of witlessness at the other.

My apologies for this post getting nowhere. We'll leave off with a Whiteheadism:

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

On the Depth and Direction of the Cosmos

As promised, we're going to drill down a little deeper into Ultimate Reality. In order to accompany us on the journey, you will need an ontological drill (AKA language); some quality timelessness with yourself; access to the source of all being; an ordinary deck of playing cards, jokers included; a 4 oz bottle of Elmer's glue (larger is fine); an X-acto knife or sharp scissors; and a sincere heart purified of all egotism, self-deception, and conspiracy indoctrination.

Let's begin!

Um, where?

In the beginning!

Of what?

Oh, let's just say intelligence, since it is obviously the alpha and omega of this entire enterprise. After all, if we aren't first intelligent, we can't even ask from whence intelligence comes. And if it comes from stupidity... well, at least that explains the left.

"Christianity," says White, "affirms that the human person is created in the 'image' and 'likeness' of God,"; or better, "toward the image and likeness."

In or toward; the choice of prepositions makes all the difference. Obviously, "toward" is the more dynamic, connoting telos and finality, or journey and destination.

However, there is really a complementarity between the two: "First, the human being is made in the image of God in a stable way due to his or her nature, as a rational person, having a spiritual soul with incorporeal powers of intelligence and free will."

Intelligence and free will. Here you must recognize that these are two seeds of the same coon: the purpose of free will is to utilize our intelligence to discover truth. If there is no free will, then we are not free to discover truth; and if there is no truth, then freedom is a kind of sick joke that reduces to nothing, AKA limitless stupidity.

If these are two s. of the same c., then the source of our being is not just intelligence but freedom. Or, as it says in 2 Corinthians, "the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And where there is liberty, there is truth; flip a few pages back, and we read in John that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Oh, and Jesus then says something rather provocative to his listeners: "you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you." Even more provocative, "You do the deeds of your father." Who is? "He was a murderer from the beginning... there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."

That is a somewhat mythopoetic way of expressing a metaphysical truth, but clearly, if you are not open to, and grounded in, the source of being-intelligence, then in what are you grounded? For in the words of the Aphorist, Myth is not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language.

Please take out your bottle of Elmer's glue, and affix your soul to this proper ground. If you have to detach yourself from the false ground, use the X-acto knife.

You will have noticed that when you are attached to the false ground, you are two things rather than one. You are in an imaginary world of paradoxical dualism instead of the real world of orthoparadoxical complementarity:

"The human animal is not two things: a spiritual substance of soul and an animal body, related to one another." No, "there is one composite person who is both body and soul." From where does this most mysterious oneness arise?

Where else? From the upper vertical. The other direction is a non-starter, because there you will find only fragmentation, dispersion, and surfaces with no depth. The featureless homogeneity of Flatland. This is the shadow of God, just as cold is only the absence of heat.

Because there is depth, there is man. It is not the other way around. If it were, then all the depth we experience would be completely illusory. In a way, intelligence is a measure of depth, isn't it? A smart person sees more deeply into the unity of things, just as a genuine artist conveys greater depth than the mediocre one. Likewise a saint and sanctity. Thus,

[T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God....

[T]he human being was created "in the beginning" to be relational in its own way. The person is made first and foremost to be in relational communion with God....

Man is a combination of melody and harmony, the former going to our uniqueness, the latter to our sameness. Harmony is vertical, whereas a melody (in western music) is a horizontal adventure through the chordal structure.

For our purposes, this chordal structure is "human nature," or universal essences and archetypes. This structure is quintessentially spatial, whereas the melody necessarily plays out in time. For which reason we say that timelessness takes time.

The melody is your Life. But it is also history, which is equally constrained by certain archetypes, for which reason we say that it "repeats." Of course it doesn't literally repeat itself, but it certainly meanders through the same archetypes. It is "going somewhere," or at least supposed to be going there.

The problem -- and this is plainly specified in the owner's manual in Genesis 3 -- is that man tries to dissolve the divine-human partnership and get there on his own -- as if one can enjoy celestial living in the sublunary world without the aid of Heaven! This always fails, because it fails before it even begins.

In other words, it eliminates the ground and measure of success, which is proximity to the absolute. A progressive in the vulgar sense is someone who has obliterated the very ground of progress. His subjective desires become the measure of success, and it's Genesis 3 All Over Again. Cosmic inversion complete.

So: "the human being is precariously located between the visible [horizontal, local] and invisible [vertical, nonlocal] worlds." The whole innerprize falls apart "without a right orientation toward [our] true homeland and a genuine knowledge of God."

Now, remove your deck of cards. Pick a card, any card. The deck is you, the card your particular action. Was the action free, or was it determined? Yes and no, for in the words of the Aphorist, sin shuffles the deck.

Matter + Math ≠ Reality

Yesterday I didn't get enough sleep because of staying up so late for the World Series on Sunday night. This morning I caught up with my sleep, but now it's too late to post.

Furthermore, being that the Gagdad constitution is a finicky contraption, I don't respond well to deviations in my rut. So, while I theoretically slept enough, I can't say I'm in shape to get behind the wheel of the cosmic bus. And yet, if I don't, then I feel as if the course of cosmic evolution will have been stalled for another 24 hours. Sad!

We were talking about exactly when man became (or becomes) Man -- or rather, examining that border between animal and person. As soon as you think about it, you realize there can't be a border, or that the border is a wall: there are animals and there are men, with no species in between. [Insert Hollywood sexual predator joke here.]

Yes, yes, there is continuity. But there is simply no common measure between animal and human minds. And when I say no common measure, I mean that absolutely literally: that certain human capacities not only surpass animality, but transcend matter altogether.

It's analogous to Flatland, in which two-dimensional beings have no way to comprehend three-dimensional ones. Nor, for that matter, will all the two-dimensional landscapes in the world add up to three dimensions. More generally, quality cannot be reduced to quantity (nor -- and for the same reason! -- subject to object).

This reminds me of the argument from causation: just as no amount of proximate or even ultimate causes adds up to the First Cause, no amount of planes adds up to a 3D space. Likewise, all the animal intelligence in the world doesn't add up to what a child spontaneously knows (i.e., essences).

There is something in the human being that absolutely transcends his material and animal antecedents. What is this something?

Our shorthand way of talking about it is with reference to a soul. Although a perfectly adequate word, it has gradually become saturated with various colloquial or agenda-driven connotations, such that it no longer means what it is supposed to mean, i.e., the form of the body. In other words, a once technical term has devolved to a kind of folk expression, similar to what has happened to the words "marriage," "man," "woman," "liberal," etc.

Jumping ahead a bit, White argues that "the ultimate foundation of reality is both personal and interrelational." And "if this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists." That's a bold statement. Can we prove it? (Yes, but in the next post.)

Recall what was said above about the first cause. The first cause of three-dimensional space cannot be the line or point, even if space is constituted by an infinite number of these.

Analogously, the first cause of the person cannot in principle be anything impersonal. The materialist will no doubt argue that this is because there is really no such thing as persons -- that what we call persons are just animals with a few more tricks. Perhaps. [Insert Frederica Wilson joke here.]

Although tempting -- the prospect of fine insultainment always is -- I'm in no mood to get into an argument with a materialist this morning. Besides, animals don't argue, and certainly not over the truth of reality. They bite, or mark territory, or fling poo, or become journalists (but I repeat myself), or run for congress, or whatever.

"Here then we can see a fundamental truth of the cosmos: there is a relational character to the hierarchy of being. The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things." Emphasis mine. Why? Because I want to emphasize 1) the verticality of it all, and 2) that this verticality cannot under any stretch of the imagination be explained in a bottom-up manner.

In other words, no amount of tenure adds up to even a particle of truth -- just as no amount of MSM reporting can ever exit the libubble narrative. Seriously. That's a joke, but a grievous one that, if you get it, should make you laugh and weep and vomit simultaneously -- assuming you haven't abandoned your soul, or your soul hasn't already departed in disgust.

Oh, it happen. It do happen.

The human being who "turns in on itself in pride and rejection of God" is vulnerable to becoming a "spiritually empty image," i.e., a container with no content. An empty barrel, you might say.

But in a properly bright-side up world, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," thus instantiating "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty" (White).

We'll try to drill down a little deeper into all of this in the next post...

The Throbbing Novelty of the Cosmos Hurtling Toward a New Post

Back when I was writing the book, I remember pondering the question of when man first appeared -- or appears, since it must recur in eachuvus -- in creation. But only for about five years or so. I read everything I could find that addressed it from an evolutionary, or anthropological, or genetic perspective, but still, there is an inevitable gap.

And when I say "inevitable," that is not a God-of-the-gaps dodge. Rather, it is true in principle, because man is something utterly sui generis, or unique, in all of creation. Although some antecedents can help account for man in retrospect, absolutely nothing could have predicted him. For how can one predict the radically novel? If one could, it wouldn't be novel.

To back up a bit, the same principle applies to existence-as-such (Existence) and to life-as-such (Life), in that both are necessarily presumed by science, not explained by it. Again, this is not a dodge: to ask why there is something instead of nothing is not a scientific question.

Although a more controversial assertion, it is also not (ultimately) a scientific question to ask about the origins of Life. Even if we could pinpoint the time and circumstances coinciding with its emergence, this still wouldn't account for the nature of Life, which is again entirely novel.

Indeed, one might say it is novelty itself. With Life we now have sensation, awareness, perception, interiority, presence, subject, each beyond the reach of even the most subtle materialism. A "science of the interior?" Yes, there is one, but it has nothing to do with science as we know it, but rather, with metaphysics.

Whitehead was all over this, so he was a big help. He thought about these ultimate issues in the Correct way, more or less. He suggests that Life "is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

Life, you might say, is the life of the cosmic party. Instead of just going around in circles, it always aims beyond itself and thus has a circular pattern: "the aim is always beyond the attained fact. The goal is some type of perfected things," whereas "inorganic nature is characterized by its acceptance of matter of fact." Borr-rring.

Do you see the revolution? With Life, there is now a wedge between fact-as-fact and fact-as-aim, or process. All of a sudden Time takes on primary importance. By which I do not mean mere chronological duration, i.e., One Damn Thing After Another, but events tied together by an inner coherence from present --> future. For a living system is an anticipatory system, and what is that?! In other words, the now is now oriented toward the great not-yet. Here is where that thing called Hope first elbows its way into creation.

"In nature, the soil rests, while the root of the plant pursues the sources of its refreshment" (Whitehead). That is a typical example of Whitehead's epigramatical pithiness, but it makes me think of how the same image applies to the mind or spirit. Obviously, the mind does not seek its refreshment in matter, unless you are seriously autistic. Rather, it grows upward and inward, ultimately seeking its refreshment in... you geist it!

We'll come back to that later.

What I really want to say is right here in a marvelous marginalia I must have written over 30 years ago, possibly a direct quote of AWN: the creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurtling itself into a new transcendent fact.

Whitehead goes on to say that higher animals seem to be "personal," in the sense that they are organized around a kind of inner center: "Thus in one sense a dog is a 'person,' and in another sense he is a non-personal society." Conversely, lower animals "seem to lack the dominance of [a] personal society," such that a tree, for example, "is a democracy."

I don't know about that. A tree must nevertheless cohere around some nonlocal essence, or it would dissolve into its constituents, as it does upon death. What really sets man apart from the trees -- some men, anyway -- is a conscious hierarchy, or better, hierarchy-become-conscious. Each of us is the king of his own castle, master of his domain.

Or ought to be, anyway. A sick person -- say, Dirty Harvey -- is indeed a democracy, in which the lowest impulse has the same rights as the noblest ideal. (If he has any ideals left -- in other words, if the bottom-up revolution hasn't been complete.)

By the way, you will have noticed how the Founders applied this same principle to politics, such that our system is neither a top-down aristocracy nor a bottom-up democracy. If it were the latter, we could vote for slavery, or for socialized medicine, or for limits on free speech.

D'oh!

We're getting awfully far afield this morning, for which I apologize. But this is the New Regime, and you might even say that it is more democratic than the old one, in that I'm simply allowing all the voices in my head a chance to speak. So there won't be as much coherence, or at least posts may not wrap themselves up as tidily as before.

Let me just get back to what started this post to begin with, which is a passage in White about the origins of man. He speaks of how "there is a kind of historical continuity between non-living things and living things, but also a differentiation and progression from one kind of reality to another, up the scale of perfection." (Recall the continuous/discontinuous chapters within the bʘʘk, and indeed of the b↻↺k itself.)

Once Life appears, there is a kind of "foundation for the emergence in human beings of specifically rational, spiritual activities of language and complex technology." Again, this emergence of human personhood cannot be reduced to antecedents, but is a Novel Thing that is "inserted," so to speak, in this new space:

At a given time, then, we can postulate that due to a new initiative of God, animals were elevated to a higher level. God began to create spiritual souls in human animals, and so the human adventure begins. There was a passage from the "merely animal" world of homo sapiens to the specifically spiritual world of the human person.

This is the passage where God initiated the new project of humanity, by creating the spiritual soul, and infusing it as the "form of the body" in what constituted the first human beings. (We might hypothesize that this took place around 50,000 years ago, given the evidence of human culture provided by paleontology.)

Agreed! What could go wrong? A note in the margin says Fall situated here. If I know myself, it must mean that if man appears at around noon, 50,000 years ago, then the fall occurs at around 12:01 PM.

The Adult is a Myth of the Child, and Vice Versa

I think that for the time being I'm just going to continue ranting about whatever pops into my mind.

I know: how is this different from the previous 3,000 posts?

Well, sometimes, without even gnosising, I start to put pressure on mysoph to stick with a certain subject or do things in a specific way. Come to think of it, it reminds me of a musician who just loves playing whatever comes into his instrument, but then accidentally has a hit song. Then, for the rest of his life he not only has to play that stupid song, but do so in the same way every night.

This is why I admire, say, Van Morrison. He's had some accidental hits along the way, including Gloria and Moondance. To this day he still plays them in concert, but always with different arrangements, tempos, instrumentation, solos, and styles -- anything from jazz to country & western. What a nightmare to be trapped in a single version! That's not music, it's architecture.

Sour grapes, Bob? I don't think so. My only concern is that there must be a fair number of people who would benefit from the blog but will never know of its existence. If I were more ambitious -- and grandiose -- then maybe I would try reach them.

But then I'd have to deal with the far greater number of people for whom the blog is not intended -- not just trolls, but normals. I can't function with those people in my head. Rather, it only works if I pull out all the stops and let it flow where it will. (For example, over at Instapundit I will occasionally make a religious comment, which only ends up offending the other mostly religious commenters. All good people no doubt, but normals through and through.)

So, today's rant will be about... I have no idea! I have a few notes to myself... let's see. The other day I was looking for a particular Aphorism, and as usual, was arrested by a hundred others I wasn't looking for. For example, The adult is a myth of the child.

Think about that: when you were a child, didn't you think of grown-ups as having all the answers and having everything under control? But how many grown-ups do you know who have all answers and have everything under control?

What an excellent cosmic joke! Look at Hollywood. Are there any adults there at all? It's easy to point to Dirty Harvey as the infant in the room, but that's just a simplistic projection. The whole place is filled with infants, just different kinds. It takes two to enact a psychic dance. Not to blame the victims, but there actually is such a thing a strong woman who would have kicked him so hard in the balls he would have choked on them.

Maybe it's easy for me to say, since I don't have a daughter. But if I did, and she were in that situation, she would hear her father's voice saying Field goal time. Kick him in the balls!

Now, just because the adult is a myth of the child, it doesn't mean there are no adults. Even so, think of how God had to get personally involved and send an actual adult down for our edification. A real man. The real man -- not just in terms of content, but especially in terms of form.

Indeed, that is the big difference: if Christ were only about the content, then he would be similar to any other teacher or prophet with some good ideas to relate. But Christ is relationship as such. Wha?

God, says White, "is a mystery of relational persons.... Thus, the ultimate foundation of all reality is both personal and interrelational. If this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists," such that "the physical cosmos ultimately exists for spiritual persons and for relational love."

This is to dis-invert the cosmos and put it back right-side up: "The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things" (emphasis mine). This is not a myth -- not of a child or anyone else. Rather, the alternatives are, in all their metamythological translunacy.

In a comment to yesterday's post I mentioned that man is a bridge, not a destiny. White agrees that "The human being is the 'bridge' between the spiritual and the physical world in a twofold way." Here we can see how the earliest Christians committed anticipatory plagiarism against me:

In the ascendent [↑] direction, the physical world mounts up toward God, or "returns" to God through human actions of knowledge and love.... In the descending [↓] direction, man is the "place" that the spiritual world is made visible or manifest in the cosmos.

Ultimately, then, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," into "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty."

And that is no myth, although children of the dark imagine it so.

What Does It Say It Is? Or, Who Do You Say I Am?

Yesterday it occurred to me that a liberal who is truly interested in equality would, more than anyone else, want children to benefit from a religious education, being that a religiously informed soul is one of the great equalizers.

But that is in the ideal world. In the real world, liberals have no interest in equality (envy is another matter), while religion as often as not stultifies the intellect.

Somewhere there is a note dashed off to myself. Here: "absolutism protects the below average & ungifted, allowing them to know and assimilate truths they could never acquire independently."

The sense of "absolutism" used here has nothing directly to do with politics, but rather, metaphysics. I was thinking of Schuon, who said something to the effect that if you must label him, then call him an Absolutist, since his first principle is knowledge of the Absolute and the human consequences flowing therefrom -- moral, social, metaphysical, and mystical.

If you fail to give children a sense of the absolute -- worse yet, take it away! -- then they will spend the rest of their lives searching for it, running from it, or pretending they already have it. Nor is it possible to advance Godward without a theological vocabulary that includes words like grace, atonement, sanctity, demon, logos, etc. It would be like trying to practice science without a vocabulary of concepts such as quantity, measurement, and law.

Marx is undoubtedly the most catastrophic exemplar of someone absolutely secure in his possession of a false absolute. Everything else is commentary, right down to today's headline, whatever it may be. In other words, the contemporary left carries on the tradition of being crocktroops of the false absolute -- or of absolute relativism.

This absolute relativism is the very quintessence of metaphysical impossibility. Unless you understand this literally, then you haven't understood it at all. You must understand that the left is animated by a fantasy of what never was and can never be. Ever. Period.

Coincidentally, a deep awareness of the distinction between Absolute and false absolute (or absolute relativism) is precisely what motivated St. John Paul in his struggle against communism. The outer or surface political struggle was just the side effect of an infinitely deeper and inner metaphysical one. Like secular saint Breitbart, he knew that politics is far downstream from culture, and that it was necessary to penetrate to the deep structure of culture to generate real change and progress. And hope. The proper and permissible kind.

Reality is a person or it is nothing. Scientism, of course, has the virtue of clarity. But even an unclear sense of God (so long as it isn't upside-down, as in the case of Islamists) is superior to clear error.

For JP2, it came down to person or matter. His first principle is the former, while Marx's is the latter. Ultimate reality is a person, or even the very possibility of personhood.

Obviously there is no possibility of personhood in materialism; rather, in this view, persons are simply side effects of matter and may be treated as such. From Lenin to Bernie Sanders, human beings are just bags of wet cement to be arranged this way or that by the state. In this context, a fascist is anyone with rudimentary taste and decency.

Along these lines, another note to myself: every so-called revolution is a counter-revolutution. Specifically, it is a reactionary rejection of Christ (or the meta-cosmic Person, to keep things ecumenical). For truly truly truly (or truly³), there is and can be no progress beyond the recognition of Absolute-as-Person. Who do you say that I AM is always the relevant question.

Another note, this one a little more cryptic: Apartheid of: class, ideology, religion.

If you think South Africa was an apartheid state, try being an absolutist on a liberal campus (or newsroom), where only the false absolute is permitted. What is the Leftopolis but a homeland for mediocrities, misfits, malcontents, and other assorted materialists, all convinced they have the Answer? This tribe does't circumcise. Rather, decapitate.

The liberal unintelligentsia does not represent the disadvantaged, but rather, consists of emissaries from the land of bad ideas; and bad ideas have a disproportionately catastrophic impact on the poor and disadvantaged, whose margin of delusion is much narrower than it is for a wealthy person. No one is crazier, for example, than Lawrence O'Donnell, but he can afford it. As can Bernie Sander, Keith Olbermann, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

You will have noticed that Satan is far too intelligent, let alone subtle, to be a materialist. However, he has no compunction about enlisting them into his service.

ProAM-tip: don't trust people, including me or Petey, who try to convince you of anything. Rather, trust what is self-evident, luminous, and intelligible -- that little truth which lights the way to infinitely more truth. Chase Truth until He catches you, and then keep chasing.

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

Thursday Morning Metaphysical Rant

Hello. This isn't part of the rant. Rather, the rant is now over, and I am now identifying it as one. A Get off my celestial lawn! moment, you might say. Getting stuff off my chest, AKA externalizing the fourth chakra. Venting the nonlocal spleen. Perhaps I should do it more often. After all, it's only how I really feel:

This should not be a controversial statement, but a first principle of any intelligent human being -- or a human being who endeavors to exercise his intelligence to the fullest: "Man by definition is a center, or 'the center' in a given universe" (Schuon).

Let's leave other hypothetical universes to the side, and restrict ourselves to this one. In this cosmos man is central, which is to say, Pontifex Maximus: not so much the Bridge Builder as the bridge itself.

Which we must simultaneously build. Irreducible orthoparadox, you see. How to put it... We are the bridge we construct in order to get from here to there. Not a horizontal there but a vertical one. In short, man is a vertical bridge, or a bridge of verticality to the father shore.

Better yet, just look at the caption of the icon in the sidebar: Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones. To which I would add beauty, each integrated with and reflecting the others.

Anticipating objections, if man is not central, who or what is? Is there a greater being we might consult, one who "contains" us or puts us in context?

Well, yes and no. Of course there are men who are greater than we are, but they are men nevertheless. To the extent that they are greater, it is because they are more central, more integrated, more actualized. They do not belong to a different species, although it sometimes seems that way. They are like men, only better. Others are like men, only worse. There are always two possible perspectives on the worstovus: subhuman? Or all too human?

Which highlights the verticality of it all. In the absence of verticality there is no better or worse, just the multicultural relativistic mush of the left. I don't mind that they don't believe in superior people and civilizations, only that they want to outlaw them (even while privileging the worst).

We're getting a little far afield, but verticality and centrality are two sides of the same reality. In a purely horizontal universe, it would of course be absurd to suggest that man -- or anything else -- is central. Therefore, the materialist is correct that there is no center in the context of materialism. But once the materialist makes such a universal statement, he has actually left materialism behind and has placed himself at the center of creation in spite of himsoph (or sophistry, to be exact).

Now we see that verticality and centrality have something to do with universality. I'm just going to throw all my cards on the table and say that these three in turn relate to eternity, infinitude, personhood, and the Absolute Subject, AKA God. None of these categories can stand alone -- which is why it is strictly impossible to be a consistent atheist, but that is a slightly different argument. Let's stay focused on this scattershot rant.

The Absolute Subject is the only conceivable principle that ties the cosmos together. Put conversely, remove or deny the A.S. and everything falls apart: we are well and truly banished to the periphery. Not even the periphery, because that presumes a center. Unending alienation in an abyss of blind nothingness -- like being stuck in a liberal university forever, with no possibility of graduation. Or an eternal waiting room with CNN droning in the background. There are no words. Only a bone-rattling cry of existential pain from abdomen to larynx to void:

But there are words, and here again, words not only connect us to the center, but are its emanation. Not for nothing does man get to name the animals. Why? Well, for starters because they are relative to us, as periphery is to center. Note that (maybe) the most degrading effect of metaphysical Darwinism is to invert this reality, and to render man relative to the beasts! Which simply cannot be.

Think about it, genius: to even say the word "Darwinism" is to have transcended Darwinism. In so doing, you have placed yourself at the center of creation, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, short of giving yourself a lobotomy and eating your neighbor. If you're an agglomeration of selfish genes, start acting like it, hypocrite! Don't partake of the detritus of Christian civilization while pretending your withered soul can subsist on the holy communion of sacred matter.

It's like the cult of Global Warming: I'll believe it when beachfront property is worth as much as a mobile home in Death Valley. Likewise, I'll believe in metaphysical Darwinism when liberals start behaving like uncivilized beasts.

Right. Let me put that in a different way.

Obviously the barbarians of the left place themselves at the center, but in the manner of the infant, who is also the center of the universe. Most of my readers probably have children, or at least were once children themselves. It is right and proper that we nourish the delusions of His Majesty the Baby, and treat him as the center of the world. We do this so he can eventually outgrow the delusion, and see that each person is a representative of the same center.

Two errors: deny him this delusion, or indulge it to excess, and the baby will spend the rest of his life in search of the Lost Entitlement. You will have created a monster. In other words, a liberal.

Bottom line for today:

"God became man that man might become God": the absolute Subject, perfect in Itself, descended into contingency so that contingency could be reintegrated into the perfection of the absolute Subject. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life": Christ identifies himself with the divine Subjectivity, which "is incarnated" in the world of contingency, in conformity with the saving tendency of the Sovereign Good....

God is intrinsically "I"; He is "He" only extrinsically and from man's vantage point.... God is the only and perfect Subject and His intent is to reintegrate the multiple and imperfect subjects...

Metaphysical Dunning-Kruger & the Elephant in the Cosmos

The other day I saw a headline on Drudge to the effect that American children are more anxious than ever. I have no idea if this is true, but I believe it. But first we have to define our terms.

Now, anxiety as such is prima facie evidence of an un- or even disintegrated mind. However, one must first determine whether the lack of integration is a cause or an effect.

For example, one may have a hormonal disturbance that causes a lack of psychic integration, which then causes anxiety. Or, think of someone with incipient Alzheimer's disease: as the mind begins to unravel, the person will start to experience anxiety, persecution, and even paranoia.

This is quite different from a primary diagnosis of anxiety. Which is also very different from normal and even necessary anxiety. Frankly, most people aren't nearly anxious enough. Or, they are anxious about the wrong things. Think of the anti-Trump hysterics. They are certainly anxious and definitely in need of treatment. But not for the Trump hysteria. Rather, they need to find out what the Trump hysteria is concealing.

We've all had that One Great Teacher, right? My own esteemed Professor Worthwhile once said... I actually have my old lecture notes hidden away somewhere, so I bet I could find the exact reference.

In any event, he said that with an anxious patient, always assume (once purely biochemical causes are ruled out) there is something in their life they're Not Paying Attention To. The anxiety is a consequence of the Elephant in the Room which they are ignoring, avoiding, repressing, or otherwise pretending doesn't exist. It is the Thing that isn't integrated but needs to be.

Some of the biggest things can't be integrated, so they require the most pretending. For example, Death. Wait. Is this true? That Death can't be integrated? Just this morning, while randomly bumping around the internet, I was reading of Lou Reed's death:

I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life -- so beautiful, painful and dazzling -- does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

For Christians, Jesus is meant to be the final cure for death anxiety, such that death is swallowed by life instead of vice versa. We'll return to this idea -- or real-idea -- later.

For the moment, let's play with this notion that anxiety and integration are inversely related. A rock, for example, is completely integrated and therefore has no anxiety. But it's easy to be integrated if you're a rock, for what is there to integrate? The reason why man is the most anxious critter in all of creation is that he has the most to integrate. Loose ends everywhere!

Indeed, man's very reason for being is the integration of everything. It's our privilege and our burden. That's what you call a Tall Order, but it is nevertheless the case, and everyone knows it, even if most pretend otherwise. Despite the pretense, it is the Prime Directive (or at least one dimension of it).

Alert readers will have noticed a zinger by Thomas Aquinas at the top of the comment box: Since a soul can know all things, in a way it is all things, and thus it is possible for the completeness of the universe to exist in one thing.

This is just another way of saying that man is in the image of the Creator, who is the Complete Person. Absent the Complete Person, no completeness of any kind would be conceivable, much less attainable, on our end. The very idea of the cosmic area rug would be a childish dream.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we are driven by a kind of anxiety until we fulfill our reason for being. Which can be accomplished in various ways, but not without God's help. For one thing, just imagine the futility of pretending a perfect integration that excludes God. Talk about ignoring the elephant in the cosmos!

Revelation is here to assure that every soul can attain this integration, regardless of various terrestrial contingencies -- existential, cultural, historical, etc. Nevertheless, unlike God, we are always trailed by shadows of the nothingness from which we were gratuitously plucked. That would be the ultimate source of our anxiety. IMO.

White makes this very point in The Light of Christ:

[T]he human being is created toward or unto the image of God because this image is not only static but ultimately dynamic.... [T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God.

However. I want to say: insert Fall here. In other words, all the Trouble is located right here, in the literally infinite space between man and God. Call it what you will, but there is room here aplenty for every kind of mischief. Or just say History.

Gosh. It's one of those mornings that I have much more to say than the ability to say it. I'm trying to wrap my mind around something that is quite obviously larger than myself, but you can't swallow an elephant in one bite. Perhaps if I had all day. In this circumstance I have but one option.

Help, Mr. Schuon, help!

"Knowledge is total or integral to the extent that its object is the most essential and thus the most real" (emphasis mine).

This most essential and real object is none other than the Elephant in -- and beyond -- the Cosmos. When we say "everything is relative," what we mean is that everything is relative to this Elephant, without which there would be no relativity at all, just a kind of absolute mush. A left with no right.

Intelligence gives rise to "the awareness of our superiority in relation to those who do not know how to discern" (discernment between the real and unreal being the function of intelligence).

However, one of the first fruits of this intelligence is awareness of the relativity of our superiority, in that it is either relative to the Elephant, or it is Nothing at All (except for maybe the anxiety of being permanently sealed in total ignorance and futility).

And of course, many people are far too stupid or ignorant to understand how stupid or ignorant they are. Metaphysical Dunning Kruger is a real thing.

Here is our omega for today, which will be tomorrow's alpha: "The human vocation is to realize that which is man's reason for being: a projection of God, and therefore a bridge between earth and Heaven."

There is degree of anxiety so long as we are suspended on this rickety bridge called life.