Shedding Metalight on the Subject of Subjectivity

Just to make sure we're on the right track, yesterday I reread a book called Incompleteness, on Gödel and his theorems. We've discussed this book in the past, but one of Goldstein's main objectives is to correct the common view that the theorems forever seal us in a closed world of subjectivity, cut off from reality. 

She compares this misconstrual to the common misunderstanding of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is actually a theory of absoluteness. Yes, motion is relative, but to an absolute: the speed of light. Nevertheless, many vulgarians think it implies that "everything is relative" or something. 

Likewise, a common postmodern interpretation of the Theorems maintains that 

the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds.... Epistemology is nothing more than the sociology of power (Goldstein). 

And we all know where this leads: to Foucault and other metacosmic perverts. Could Gödel actually be an oddfather of the left? Not bloody likely. Yes he was crazy, but not that crazy.  

Rather, as Goldstein explains,

Gödel's theorems don't demonstrate the limits of the human mind, but rather, the limits of computational models of the human mind (basically, models that reduce all thinking to rule following). 

Along these lines, I also re-skimmed Robert Rosen's Life Itself for additional hints at where this series of posts might be headed. Lots of important stuff in there, but I'll try to limit myself to the most relevant passages:

The celebrated Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program. Basically, he showed that, no matter how one tries to formalize a particular part of mathematics, syntactic truth in the formalization does not coincide with (is narrower than) the set of truths about numbers.

In short, semantics cannot in principle be reduced to syntax, or meaning to order. This is big. No, bigger than big: infinite. For "no finite set of numerical qualities"

exhausts the set of of all numerical qualities. There is always a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by that syntactical scheme.

D'oh! 

Or Woo Hoo!, depending on how you look at it, because it means that meaning always persists despite our efforts to contain it via form. Which goes precisely to our larger point -- or intuition -- that esoterism can never be reduced to the exoteric formulations of dogma. 

In one sense this is blandingly obvious, but in another it is anything but, being that for the great majority of people, esoterism is by no means obvious. It may be obvious to you and me, but we're weird. Ofttimes the conventionally religious person makes even less sense to us than does the babbling village atheist. At least the latter isn't an affront to our hindbrain, even if he's a hindrance to our front brain.

Biology may look "soft" to a physicist, but don't confuse complexity with softness. Rather, as Rosen points out, a material system is not necessarily -- in fact, usually not -- a simple system but a complex system, because the latter has more qualities than can be accommodated by mere syntax.

For example, this is why climate science is such a travesty. Economics too, at least the kind that pretends to leap over Hayek's wall and know the unknowable. 

Now, meta-questions about this or that discipline aren't usually contained in the field itself -- for example, physics isn't equipped to answer metaphysical questions, and to the extent that it tries, it merely beclowns itself (e.g., via materialism, positivism, scientism, or any other approach that tries to magically explain the higher via the lower).

Gödel, in the words of Goldstein, was primarily interested in shedding metalight on the metalevel of reality. But I would say it was more of a.... not light per se, but a cleaning of the window, so to speak. The theorems themselves aren't the light, but they do allow us to transcend the relative darkness of mere syntactical formulations, if you're following me, and it is this higher metalight that is of interest to us.

But ironically, Gödel himself was limited and hemmed in by his own Platonism. On the one hand he was "committed to the possibility, pace the positivists, beyond our experiences to describe the world 'out yonder.'" 

But he limited this yonder to "a reality of pure abstraction, of universal and necessary truths," as opposed to plugging into the living God -- or let's just say to the Cosmic Person, who can never be reduced to any form of syntax, not even to his own name! While he is the logocentric source of speech, he also shatters speech, for the Singer transcends the song. 

We're running out of time, and there is much more to come, but let's just stipulate at this point that the Principle that ultimately explains why semantics cannot be reduced to syntax is the Person.

Shedding Metalight on the Subject of Subjectivity

Just to make sure we're on the right track, yesterday I reread a book called Incompleteness, on Gödel and his theorems. We've discussed this book in the past, but one of Goldstein's main objectives is to correct the common view that the theorems forever seal us in a closed world of subjectivity, cut off from reality. 

She compares this misconstrual to the common misunderstanding of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is actually a theory of absoluteness. Yes, motion is relative, but to an absolute: the speed of light. Nevertheless, many vulgarians think it implies that "everything is relative" or something. 

Likewise, a common postmodern interpretation of the Theorems maintains that 

the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds.... Epistemology is nothing more than the sociology of power (Goldstein). 

And we all know where this leads: to Foucault and other metacosmic perverts. Could Gödel actually be an oddfather of the left? Not bloody likely. Yes he was crazy, but not that crazy.  

Rather, as Goldstein explains,

Gödel's theorems don't demonstrate the limits of the human mind, but rather, the limits of computational models of the human mind (basically, models that reduce all thinking to rule following). 

Along these lines, I also re-skimmed Robert Rosen's Life Itself for additional hints at where this series of posts might be headed. Lots of important stuff in there, but I'll try to limit myself to the most relevant passages:

The celebrated Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program. Basically, he showed that, no matter how one tries to formalize a particular part of mathematics, syntactic truth in the formalization does not coincide with (is narrower than) the set of truths about numbers.

In short, semantics cannot in principle be reduced to syntax, or meaning to order. This is big. No, bigger than big: infinite. For "no finite set of numerical qualities"

exhausts the set of of all numerical qualities. There is always a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by that syntactical scheme.

D'oh! 

Or Woo Hoo!, depending on how you look at it, because it means that meaning always persists despite our efforts to contain it via form. Which goes precisely to our larger point -- or intuition -- that esoterism can never be reduced to the exoteric formulations of dogma. 

In one sense this is blandingly obvious, but in another it is anything but, being that for the great majority of people, esoterism is by no means obvious. It may be obvious to you and me, but we're weird. Ofttimes the conventionally religious person makes even less sense to us than does the babbling village atheist. At least the latter isn't an affront to our hindbrain, even if he's a hindrance to our front brain.

Biology may look "soft" to a physicist, but don't confuse complexity with softness. Rather, as Rosen points out, a material system is not necessarily -- in fact, usually not -- a simple system but a complex system, because the latter has more qualities than can be accommodated by mere syntax.

For example, this is why climate science is such a travesty. Economics too, at least the kind that pretends to leap over Hayek's wall and know the unknowable. 

Now, meta-questions about this or that discipline aren't usually contained in the field itself -- for example, physics isn't equipped to answer metaphysical questions, and to the extent that it tries, it merely beclowns itself (e.g., via materialism, positivism, scientism, or any other approach that tries to magically explain the higher via the lower).

Gödel, in the words of Goldstein, was primarily interested in shedding metalight on the metalevel of reality. But I would say it was more of a.... not light per se, but a cleaning of the window, so to speak. The theorems themselves aren't the light, but they do allow us to transcend the relative darkness of mere syntactical formulations, if you're following me, and it is this higher metalight that is of interest to us.

But ironically, Gödel himself was limited and hemmed in by his own Platonism. On the one hand he was "committed to the possibility, pace the positivists, beyond our experiences to describe the world 'out yonder.'" 

But he limited this yonder to "a reality of pure abstraction, of universal and necessary truths," as opposed to plugging into the living God -- or let's just say to the Cosmic Person, who can never be reduced to any form of syntax, not even to his own name! While he is the logocentric source of speech, he also shatters speech, for the Singer transcends the song. 

We're running out of time, and there is much more to come, but let's just stipulate at this point that the Principle that ultimately explains why semantics cannot be reduced to syntax is the Person.

O, ʘ, and Ö

An idea just popped into my head that may prove true, false, or not even false. Let's find out!

More generally, my discarnate collaborator only throws out titles for posts, leaving the details to me. These gnomic utterances always reflect a primordial truth -- however obscurely -- even if my efforts to explicate it may fall short.

The idea is this: that perhaps Gödel's incompleteness theorems go to the differences between exoteric and esoteric religion. 

As we know, the theorems mandate that a system can be complete or consistent, but not both; completeness is purchased at the cost of consistency, and vice versa. According to Prof. Wiki,

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. 

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it strikes me as self-evident that no one outside of God could be wholly complete and consistent. Indeed, necessary and eternal being is the source of any consistency or completeness herebelow; for example, every "whole" derives from wholeness as such.

For the restavus finite beings, we are more or less one or the other. Physics is rigorously consistent but obviously incomplete, helpless as it is to explain (for example) the consciousness of the physicist or the conformity of mind to being.

Most religions take a stab at completeness, but if one pushes the doctrine too far, it will reveal inevitable inconsistencies.  The Bible, for example, isn't self-authenticating.

Esoterism is as close to completeness and consistency as man can get. Yes, there is incompleteness, but that is down to our not being God. And there is inconsistency, but this is in the nature of things. Somewhere Schuon has an illuminating comment about this, or at least a decent alibi. 

One the one hand,

only sapiential esoterism, total and universal -- not partial and formalistic -- can satisfy every legitimate need for logical explanations.... it alone can answer all the questions raised by religious divergences and limitations.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the expressible, and 

it is no one's fault if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions, at least in respect of a given need for logical explanation and on the plane of dialectic.

For, just as no form can exhaust the formless, "it is all too evident that wisdom cannot start from the intention of expressing the ineffable." 

Wisdom can never be complete, but it is certainly more complete than knowledge, reason, information, or fact. There's an incompleteness built into the nature of things, at least on this side of rug, if only because it's not that side.  

More details to come. Retirement doesn't mean there aren't trivialities to deal with.

O, ʘ, and Ö

An idea just popped into my head that may prove true, false, or not even false. Let's find out!

More generally, my discarnate collaborator only throws out titles for posts, leaving the details to me. These gnomic utterances always reflect a primordial truth -- however obscurely -- even if my efforts to explicate it may fall short.

The idea is this: that perhaps Gödel's incompleteness theorems go to the differences between exoteric and esoteric religion. 

As we know, the theorems mandate that a system can be complete or consistent, but not both; completeness is purchased at the cost of consistency, and vice versa. According to Prof. Wiki,

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. 

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it strikes me as self-evident that no one outside of God could be wholly complete and consistent. Indeed, necessary and eternal being is the source of any consistency or completeness herebelow; for example, every "whole" derives from wholeness as such.

For the restavus finite beings, we are more or less one or the other. Physics is rigorously consistent but obviously incomplete, helpless as it is to explain (for example) the consciousness of the physicist or the conformity of mind to being.

Most religions take a stab at completeness, but if one pushes the doctrine too far, it will reveal inevitable inconsistencies.  The Bible, for example, isn't self-authenticating.

Esoterism is as close to completeness and consistency as man can get. Yes, there is incompleteness, but that is down to our not being God. And there is inconsistency, but this is in the nature of things. Somewhere Schuon has an illuminating comment about this, or at least a decent alibi. 

One the one hand,

only sapiential esoterism, total and universal -- not partial and formalistic -- can satisfy every legitimate need for logical explanations.... it alone can answer all the questions raised by religious divergences and limitations.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the expressible, and 

it is no one's fault if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions, at least in respect of a given need for logical explanation and on the plane of dialectic.

For, just as no form can exhaust the formless, "it is all too evident that wisdom cannot start from the intention of expressing the ineffable." 

Wisdom can never be complete, but it is certainly more complete than knowledge, reason, information, or fact. There's an incompleteness built into the nature of things, at least on this side of rug, if only because it's not that side.  

More details to come. Retirement doesn't mean there aren't trivialities to deal with.

Caste and Character

Change my mind:

Psychologically speaking a natural caste is a cosmos; men live in different cosmoses according to the "reality" on which they are centered; it is impossible for the inferior really to understand the superior, for he who really understands "is" what he understands (Schuon).

Elsewhere in the same essay (on The Meaning of Caste), Schuon writes that "the fundamental tendency in a man is connected with his 'feeling' or 'consciousness' of what is 'real.'" 

The idea of caste represents a quasi-mythological preconception of what we now understand about character, which is indeed very much inherited (e.g., neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, not to mention general intelligence, impulse control, time preference, and others).  

You could say that these more "granular" traits and tendencies go into the formation of more general categories and types such as contemplative, warrior, artisan, merchant, peasant, and schlub.

For example, our criminal class -- or underclass, if you prefer -- tends to be low in intelligence but high in time preference and impulsivity. 

Leftists are more emotional than logical, in large part because they are more feminine than masculine. A "male leftist" is a contradiction in terms, no matter the anomaly between zys legs. A happily married (to a man) feminist is another contradiction in terms.  

As to what is more real to this or that caste, for the contemplative (priestly) type it is the transcendent as such, whereas for the knight-warrior it is the transcendent ideal as instantiated in action and struggle: his imperative is to vindicate the ideal in battle. 

For the merchant "it is riches, security, prosperity and well-being that are 'real.'" I have some very successful businessmen in my extended family (billionaires even), but talking to them about anything transcending matter would be like discussing poetry with my dog. Indeed, they even have a kind of condescending and worldly cynicism about the transcendent, as if we are trying to put one over on them.   

We can see how this plays out in our elite merchant hive of technoid insects. The vertical Dunning Krugery in these inferior superiors is strong! These folks not only lack "the mentality of the higher, but cannot even conceive of it exactly," which results in an interpretation of what we are saying in terms of what they are capable of understanding, which isn't much. Certainly we see this in our trolls. Thus,

men whose souls are fragmentary and opaque pretend that they can instruct us in the "psychology" of greatness and of the sacred.

When this type of person becomes an "intellectual," the intellect remains tied to the opaque and the fragmentary, AKA matter. How could it not? As Schuon says, "caste can be lost but not acquired." People are who they are, and not someone else. Pretending otherwise is a great source of vulgarity -- for example, the editorial page of the NY Times, which features anti-intellectual lunatics posing as intellectuals. They are also full of pride, which is always a giveaway. 

There is an interesting inverse analogy between the man with no point (discussed in yesterday's post) and the pointless man, since both wander off the grid, so to speak. The "shudra" is like "a body endowed with human consciousness" and therefore "properly qualified only for manual work of a more or less quantitative kind."  

We are all familiar with this type of person, if only because we can see them on TV flooding our southern border. There is no question that our economy requires such people, but up to a point. You can't produce wealth by everyone being everyone else's gardener and nanny. 

I myself toiled in solidarity with this type for a good portion of my life, for not only did I work in a supermarket until I was 33 years of age, I fit right in. I was one of them -- a body endowed with human consciousness -- until some sort of light unexpectedly switched on when I was around 25 or so. Even so, I still consider my self a thoroughly blue-collar suburban shaman.

This is an accurate description of us: "it is bodily things that are 'real'; it is eating and drinking" or "the satisfaction of immediate physical needs" which "constitute happiness." You can usually trust this kind of person, because they are very uncomplicated -- like a man, only more so. 

At least so long as he is gainfully employed. This type can get into a lot of trouble without a simple job, which is why they have been among the primary victims of the global economy. A person who loses his factory job is not going to become an engineer or doctor or lawyer. More likely a fentanyl enthusiast. They don't deal well with the pointlessness.

Caste and Character

Change my mind:

Psychologically speaking a natural caste is a cosmos; men live in different cosmoses according to the "reality" on which they are centered; it is impossible for the inferior really to understand the superior, for he who really understands "is" what he understands (Schuon).

Elsewhere in the same essay (on The Meaning of Caste), Schuon writes that "the fundamental tendency in a man is connected with his 'feeling' or 'consciousness' of what is 'real.'" 

The idea of caste represents a quasi-mythological preconception of what we now understand about character, which is indeed very much inherited (e.g., neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, not to mention general intelligence, impulse control, time preference, and others).  

You could say that these more "granular" traits and tendencies go into the formation of more general categories and types such as contemplative, warrior, artisan, merchant, peasant, and schlub.

For example, our criminal class -- or underclass, if you prefer -- tends to be low in intelligence but high in time preference and impulsivity. 

Leftists are more emotional than logical, in large part because they are more feminine than masculine. A "male leftist" is a contradiction in terms, no matter the anomaly between zys legs. A happily married (to a man) feminist is another contradiction in terms.  

As to what is more real to this or that caste, for the contemplative (priestly) type it is the transcendent as such, whereas for the knight-warrior it is the transcendent ideal as instantiated in action and struggle: his imperative is to vindicate the ideal in battle. 

For the merchant "it is riches, security, prosperity and well-being that are 'real.'" I have some very successful businessmen in my extended family (billionaires even), but talking to them about anything transcending matter would be like discussing poetry with my dog. Indeed, they even have a kind of condescending and worldly cynicism about the transcendent, as if we are trying to put one over on them.   

We can see how this plays out in our elite merchant hive of technoid insects. The vertical Dunning Krugery in these inferior superiors is strong! These folks not only lack "the mentality of the higher, but cannot even conceive of it exactly," which results in an interpretation of what we are saying in terms of what they are capable of understanding, which isn't much. Certainly we see this in our trolls. Thus,

men whose souls are fragmentary and opaque pretend that they can instruct us in the "psychology" of greatness and of the sacred.

When this type of person becomes an "intellectual," the intellect remains tied to the opaque and the fragmentary, AKA matter. How could it not? As Schuon says, "caste can be lost but not acquired." People are who they are, and not someone else. Pretending otherwise is a great source of vulgarity -- for example, the editorial page of the NY Times, which features anti-intellectual lunatics posing as intellectuals. They are also full of pride, which is always a giveaway. 

There is an interesting inverse analogy between the man with no point (discussed in yesterday's post) and the pointless man, since both wander off the grid, so to speak. The "shudra" is like "a body endowed with human consciousness" and therefore "properly qualified only for manual work of a more or less quantitative kind."  

We are all familiar with this type of person, if only because we can see them on TV flooding our southern border. There is no question that our economy requires such people, but up to a point. You can't produce wealth by everyone being everyone else's gardener and nanny. 

I myself toiled in solidarity with this type for a good portion of my life, for not only did I work in a supermarket until I was 33 years of age, I fit right in. I was one of them -- a body endowed with human consciousness -- until some sort of light unexpectedly switched on when I was around 25 or so. Even so, I still consider my self a thoroughly blue-collar suburban shaman.

This is an accurate description of us: "it is bodily things that are 'real'; it is eating and drinking" or "the satisfaction of immediate physical needs" which "constitute happiness." You can usually trust this kind of person, because they are very uncomplicated -- like a man, only more so. 

At least so long as he is gainfully employed. This type can get into a lot of trouble without a simple job, which is why they have been among the primary victims of the global economy. A person who loses his factory job is not going to become an engineer or doctor or lawyer. More likely a fentanyl enthusiast. They don't deal well with the pointlessness.

The Point of Pointlessness

Lately I've been thinking that the blog needs a point. Personally, I've never had a point, as I seem to have been born without one. 

I was just a kid in the '60s, so I can't be absolutely sure if I was literally born pointless or inhaled too much of the hippy vibe growing up (in California no less), but if you called me an "alt hippy," you wouldn't be wide of the mark.  

I've always been this way: no master plan, no future, not even a tomorrow, just moment to moment, takin' her easy for all you sinners out there. I never planned to be a psychologist -- of all things -- just as I never planned not to be one, but here we are, since I up 'n decided to retire, just like that. I couldn't care less about psychology (except for the perennial kind ordered to human nature).  

*Ironically,* I finished grad school in 1988, the same year Prozac came to market. In terms of therapy, medication is cheap while talk is expensive. More to the point, it never occurred to me that I had the power to cure souls. Perhaps help them "adjust," but to what? Reality?   No way. Maybe to some very narrow slice of conventional reality that interests me not in the least.

Which is perhaps a bit strange: how many people can well and truly look back at the end of their career and say: eh, so what? I never, not for a moment, lived to work. Rather, vice versa: worked to live. 

But at the same time, I never, ever, lived for life. Rather, life is far too interesting to merely live it. Animals do that. So much of what folks call "living" never held the least interest to me. The business of doing was always a distraction from the more vital isness of being. 

Meta-living? Perhaps. Yes and no, because extremes meet: two things have always preoccupied me: 1) the present moment, and 2) eternity. Truly, nothing else is really real or worth the effort. 

Rather, reality -- or the most real -- is always the bifurcation of time by eternity, which is what gives the present moment it's depth, its light, its "heft." There's no place like OM, nowhere else to go, to be, or to see. You're here. Might was well enjoy it.

It took me a little while to consciously embrace this philosophy -- or "natural theology," so to speak -- for the simple reason that no one else seemed to embrace it, certainly not in my bourgeois, middle class neck of the woods. There were no models anywhere, except maybe bums and hobos. True, my Uncle Peter never seemed to have a real job, but not because he didn't want one.  He was just an amiable loser.

Apparently, a fair number of people -- especially men -- have difficulty with retirement, and women struggle with the point of life after the children leave the nest.

For me it has always been the other way around: doing stuff was pointless, not doing them the point. The best things in life are free of a point; they aren't for the sake of something else, but for their own sake. 

But for the average person, there is a sort of "wall" between doing and being. They become anxious with nothing to do, and therefore can't enjoy it. Here again, I'm the opposite: I dread the Full Plate.

I'm reminded of a remark by Eckhart about "living without a why." That's all I remember about it, but the phrase stuck. Come to think of it, when I was younger, I used to "advocate" this philosophy to others, until I realized that it can't really be a universal imperative per se, but only applicable to the personalities who are destined to be this way -- any more than it would make sense to advise a midget to pursue the dream of an NBA career.

Rather, it comes down to natural castes, or karma, or dharma, or something. Schuon discusses this in an essay called The Meaning of Caste. You know them well: there are natural priests, aristocrats, kings, scholars, knight-warriors, merchants, peasants, outcastes, sociopaths, etc. 

Moreover, our entropic and chaotic times are characterized by a deep and systemic confusion of roles, e.g., peasants posing as scholars and rulers, crazy outcastes (e.g., cross-dressing freaks) pretending to be warriors and athletes, merchants posing as police (our technofascist overlords), criminals as presidents, etc. 

Only in such a world can a lazy but smooth talking anti-intellectual such as Obama be seen as a Philosopher King and Evolutionary Lightbringer. And yet, here we are, in his third term.

The idea of natural castes is obviously at antipodes to the naive and outmoded blank-slatism that is the first principle of the anti-science left, i.e., that anyone can be anything with enough social engineering. The alt-right recognizes that people are who they are, except they attribute this solely to genetics, since that's all they have (they tend toward atheism and scientism). 

Genetics obviously plays a large role, but just as there can by definition be no gene for homosexuality, nor can there be a gene for the priesthood, at least in the sense I am using the term (a supernaturally natural, intrinsic priesthood). The alt-right talks about a "gene for belief," but this explains nothing. Is there a gene for a belief in belief? 

The point is, the human station is bound -- or bordered -- at two ends. At one end is biology, about which there can be no doubt. But to reduce the human person to biology is both self-defeating and obviously soph-defeating, because it reduces wisdom to knowledge and ought to is. Ought we believe in genetic determinism? You see the problem. Let's say ta-ta to tautology and hello to our vertical telovator.

Anyway, the human station is bound at the other end by... you name it. Men call this boundary -- or beyond this boundary -- "God," but this can cause as much confusion as it clarifies, especially in these crazy times, in which the Average Moron will immediately ask, Whose God?  

Anyway, reducing transcendence to immanence is always an error. It is a cosmic heresy, whether it is reduced to dialectical materialism or the dialectic of natural selection. Not only is transcendence real, it is the most real, and certainly more real than the material plane. Worlds will continue to come and go, but 2 + 2 will always be 4 in every one of them, except where truth is attacked and reality denied, AKA, on the left, which always -- for this is its deep structure -- replaces truth with power.

The Point of Pointlessness

Lately I've been thinking that the blog needs a point. Personally, I've never had a point, as I seem to have been born without one. 

I was just a kid in the '60s, so I can't be absolutely sure if I was literally born pointless or inhaled too much of the hippy vibe growing up (in California no less), but if you called me an "alt hippy," you wouldn't be wide of the mark.  

I've always been this way: no master plan, no future, not even a tomorrow, just moment to moment, takin' her easy for all you sinners out there. I never planned to be a psychologist -- of all things -- just as I never planned not to be one, but here we are, since I up 'n decided to retire, just like that. I couldn't care less about psychology (except for the perennial kind ordered to human nature).  

*Ironically,* I finished grad school in 1988, the same year Prozac came to market. In terms of therapy, medication is cheap while talk is expensive. More to the point, it never occurred to me that I had the power to cure souls. Perhaps help them "adjust," but to what? Reality?   No way. Maybe to some very narrow slice of conventional reality that interests me not in the least.

Which is perhaps a bit strange: how many people can well and truly look back at the end of their career and say: eh, so what? I never, not for a moment, lived to work. Rather, vice versa: worked to live. 

But at the same time, I never, ever, lived for life. Rather, life is far too interesting to merely live it. Animals do that. So much of what folks call "living" never held the least interest to me. The business of doing was always a distraction from the more vital isness of being. 

Meta-living? Perhaps. Yes and no, because extremes meet: two things have always preoccupied me: 1) the present moment, and 2) eternity. Truly, nothing else is really real or worth the effort. 

Rather, reality -- or the most real -- is always the bifurcation of time by eternity, which is what gives the present moment it's depth, its light, its "heft." There's no place like OM, nowhere else to go, to be, or to see. You're here. Might was well enjoy it.

It took me a little while to consciously embrace this philosophy -- or "natural theology," so to speak -- for the simple reason that no one else seemed to embrace it, certainly not in my bourgeois, middle class neck of the woods. There were no models anywhere, except maybe bums and hobos. True, my Uncle Peter never seemed to have a real job, but not because he didn't want one.  He was just an amiable loser.

Apparently, a fair number of people -- especially men -- have difficulty with retirement, and women struggle with the point of life after the children leave the nest.

For me it has always been the other way around: doing stuff was pointless, not doing them the point. The best things in life are free of a point; they aren't for the sake of something else, but for their own sake. 

But for the average person, there is a sort of "wall" between doing and being. They become anxious with nothing to do, and therefore can't enjoy it. Here again, I'm the opposite: I dread the Full Plate.

I'm reminded of a remark by Eckhart about "living without a why." That's all I remember about it, but the phrase stuck. Come to think of it, when I was younger, I used to "advocate" this philosophy to others, until I realized that it can't really be a universal imperative per se, but only applicable to the personalities who are destined to be this way -- any more than it would make sense to advise a midget to pursue the dream of an NBA career.

Rather, it comes down to natural castes, or karma, or dharma, or something. Schuon discusses this in an essay called The Meaning of Caste. You know them well: there are natural priests, aristocrats, kings, scholars, knight-warriors, merchants, peasants, outcastes, sociopaths, etc. 

Moreover, our entropic and chaotic times are characterized by a deep and systemic confusion of roles, e.g., peasants posing as scholars and rulers, crazy outcastes (e.g., cross-dressing freaks) pretending to be warriors and athletes, merchants posing as police (our technofascist overlords), criminals as presidents, etc. 

Only in such a world can a lazy but smooth talking anti-intellectual such as Obama be seen as a Philosopher King and Evolutionary Lightbringer. And yet, here we are, in his third term.

The idea of natural castes is obviously at antipodes to the naive and outmoded blank-slatism that is the first principle of the anti-science left, i.e., that anyone can be anything with enough social engineering. The alt-right recognizes that people are who they are, except they attribute this solely to genetics, since that's all they have (they tend toward atheism and scientism). 

Genetics obviously plays a large role, but just as there can by definition be no gene for homosexuality, nor can there be a gene for the priesthood, at least in the sense I am using the term (a supernaturally natural, intrinsic priesthood). The alt-right talks about a "gene for belief," but this explains nothing. Is there a gene for a belief in belief? 

The point is, the human station is bound -- or bordered -- at two ends. At one end is biology, about which there can be no doubt. But to reduce the human person to biology is both self-defeating and obviously soph-defeating, because it reduces wisdom to knowledge and ought to is. Ought we believe in genetic determinism? You see the problem. Let's say ta-ta to tautology and hello to our vertical telovator.

Anyway, the human station is bound at the other end by... you name it. Men call this boundary -- or beyond this boundary -- "God," but this can cause as much confusion as it clarifies, especially in these crazy times, in which the Average Moron will immediately ask, Whose God?  

Anyway, reducing transcendence to immanence is always an error. It is a cosmic heresy, whether it is reduced to dialectical materialism or the dialectic of natural selection. Not only is transcendence real, it is the most real, and certainly more real than the material plane. Worlds will continue to come and go, but 2 + 2 will always be 4 in every one of them, except where truth is attacked and reality denied, AKA, on the left, which always -- for this is its deep structure -- replaces truth with power.

Prolegomena to a Christian Dudeism

A short post. For a change.

Unless and until the dictionary folk decide to redefine the term in keeping with the dictates of the left, abide can be a transitive verb meaning

1: a: to bear patiently: TOLERATE

   b: to endure without yielding: WITHSTAND

2: to wait for: AWAIT  

or an intransitive verb meaning

1: to remain stable or fixed in a state 

2: to continue in a place: SOJOURN

Now, it is axiomatic that the Dude abides, but in various ways and in diverse circumstances throughout history -- and, in the archetypal sense, throughout metahistory.

Genuine abiding is always in the context of a sojourn, which is to say, a spiritual journey, and this journey is ultimately the return to God, i.e., to the ultimate principle that ties the cosmos together.

In the Hebrew Bible, the most extreme case of patience in the face of unchecked aggression is in the book of Job. Despite being a blameless and upright dude, he enters a world of pain, only for things to work out pretty good in the end.  

There is a great deal of abiding in the New Testament as well, especially in John:

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

Because some of the apostles were out of their element, Jesus explained further:

I am the vine, and you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

John writes that although "the world is passing away," "he who does the will of God abides forever." Likewise, Peter says pretty much the same thing, that the word of God "lives and abides forever." This implies that abiding is the nexus of time and eternity.

Now, one of the four cardinal virtues is fortitude. However, there is the active fortitude required to, say, check the aggression of worthy adversaries in a war without rules, but there is also a passive form of fortitude that is not to be confused with pacifism, the latter being just a nihilistic pose for fragile people with emotional problems to hide behind. Am I wrong?

As it pertains to the interior sojourn, Fr. Reginald explains that the virtue of patience

is the most frequent form under which fortitude of the soul is exercised in the vexations of life. 

In the tournament of life, there are the inevitable ups and downs, strikes and gutters, but both forms of fortitude helps us to "to bear the evils of life with equanimity of soul" and "ascend toward the same summit."   

Conversely, "the impatient man, no matter how violent he may be, is a weak man." Though he may claim to be perfectly calm -- even calmer than you are -- "when he raises his voice and murmurs, he really succumbs from the moral point of view." 

Now, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is Holy Saturday, which Pope Benedict called a “'no man’s land' between the Death and the Resurrection." It seems that between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection is the abiding.

Prolegomena to a Christian Dudeism

A short post. For a change.

Unless and until the dictionary folk decide to redefine the term in keeping with the dictates of the left, abide can be a transitive verb meaning

1: a: to bear patiently: TOLERATE

   b: to endure without yielding: WITHSTAND

2: to wait for: AWAIT  

or an intransitive verb meaning

1: to remain stable or fixed in a state 

2: to continue in a place: SOJOURN

Now, it is axiomatic that the Dude abides, but in various ways and in diverse circumstances throughout history -- and, in the archetypal sense, throughout metahistory.

Genuine abiding is always in the context of a sojourn, which is to say, a spiritual journey, and this journey is ultimately the return to God, i.e., to the ultimate principle that ties the cosmos together.

In the Hebrew Bible, the most extreme case of patience in the face of unchecked aggression is in the book of Job. Despite being a blameless and upright dude, he enters a world of pain, only for things to work out pretty good in the end.  

There is a great deal of abiding in the New Testament as well, especially in John:

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

Because some of the apostles were out of their element, Jesus explained further:

I am the vine, and you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

John writes that although "the world is passing away," "he who does the will of God abides forever." Likewise, Peter says pretty much the same thing, that the word of God "lives and abides forever." This implies that abiding is the nexus of time and eternity.

Now, one of the four cardinal virtues is fortitude. However, there is the active fortitude required to, say, check the aggression of worthy adversaries in a war without rules, but there is also a passive form of fortitude that is not to be confused with pacifism, the latter being just a nihilistic pose for fragile people with emotional problems to hide behind. Am I wrong?

As it pertains to the interior sojourn, Fr. Reginald explains that the virtue of patience

is the most frequent form under which fortitude of the soul is exercised in the vexations of life. 

In the tournament of life, there are the inevitable ups and downs, strikes and gutters, but both forms of fortitude helps us to "to bear the evils of life with equanimity of soul" and "ascend toward the same summit."   

Conversely, "the impatient man, no matter how violent he may be, is a weak man." Though he may claim to be perfectly calm -- even calmer than you are -- "when he raises his voice and murmurs, he really succumbs from the moral point of view." 

Now, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is Holy Saturday, which Pope Benedict called a “'no man’s land' between the Death and the Resurrection." It seems that between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection is the abiding.

Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You

Back in the day, I used to occasionally dredge the arkive and pull up a moldy artifact worthy of a re-read. 

After, all, these posts are never intended to be timebound, otherwise why bother? Nothing is more disposable than yesterday's news, so even when a post is oriented around the hysteria of the moment, it is in order to elucidate a deeper principle. If they're only about the left's daily tantrum, to hell with it. Who needs another voice yelling at you about things you can see with your own three eyes?

There were other excuses. For example, presumably few folks read the blog every day, let alone every year or decade, so for them an old post will be as new. 

For that matter, these decroded posts might as well be new to me, since they're banged out spontaneously in a certain frame of mind. Reading is very much a different mode, i.e., receptive but critical vs. expressive and perhaps a tad forgiving. 

Rereading a post allows me to view it with more critical distance and see if it passes the current sniff test. If something smells off, I can excise the rotten part and perhaps save the rest of the post from infection. Moreover, I inevitably encounter cringworthy passages I can blot from the Akashic record. 

The bottom line is, I really have no idea what's down there, so I'm as surprised as anyone else.

And frankly, at the moment I have nothing new to report, just the same old counter narrative. When this occurs, I never know if it's the end of the blog or just the end of a cycle. In any event, it affords me the opportunity to look down and back. Gnostalgia. 

Now, these are dark times. But so too was Obama's previous reign -- or incarnation, rather -- so I thought to myself, why not go back exactly 12 years and see what we were going on about? Maybe we can learn something, if only this too shall pass. No doubt into something even worse.  

Here it is, March 30, 2009:  Surfing the Eternal Waves of Novelty to the Sands of Time: 

We were discussing the freedom of the object -- which in itself is a strange sounding notion, being that we usually think of freedom as residing only in the subject, if indeed we acknowledge spiritual freedom at all. 

To put it another way, if the subject weren't free, then it would not only be an object, but we would have no name for it. Or any other names, for that matter. Bottom line: to say object is to say subject. Now, one of these must be prior, and it surely isn't the former.

The infinite plenitude of the object world reminds me of something I once read on the back of a Sinatra album by the king of comedically bad liner notes, a man named Stan Cornyn. 

For you youngsters out there, vinyl albums used to have an essay on back about the music therein, sometimes by a critic or celebrity, other times by an obsequious PR flack such as Cornyn. Although Frank -- overly harshly, in my opinion -- dismissed the song as "a piece of Shit," Cornyn enthused that Sinatra's phrasing   

comes out mmmmmmmmm all the way. If he runs out of gas on a phrase, which is a very rare bird for the man, then he runs out of gas two-and-a-half miles after anybody else would. He sings like he's got an extra tank of Texaco in his tummy (emphasis mine).

That's the point we're driving at: the object world always appears to us as if it's got an extra tank in its tummy: no matter how much we know, there's always more to be known. The tank never reaches empty, or we would be as God.

When we look at the world "the possibilities of life are infinitely more abundant than what is actually on display.... There is an incomprehensible prodigality in the very essence of life" (Balthasar). 

I remember something Whitehead said along similar lines -- that out of the infinite pool of possibilities, only a relative few undergo the formality of becoming. Potential is infinite. Reality is finite. Or, time is the serial crystallization of possibility.

Of course, the higher up the ladder we ascend, the more this becomes apparent. For example, one of our unavoidable limitations -- or sad conditions of existence -- is that a single lifetime can never be sufficient to actualize all that is latent within us. D'oh!

In the words of the Aphorist: The intellectual capital of the adult is often restricted to a small lottery he won in adolescence.

This is an odd situation that should be noticed by more people, but I think the problem is that most people foreclose their infinite potential so early in life, they don't really feel the sting, except in a vague or displaced manner. 

Then again, it would be a waste of timelessness to dwell on this inherent lack, because life itself floats atop this infinite sea of potential. Imagine if existence were as simplistic as imagined by the metaphysical Darwinist or bonehead atheist, deprived of its intrinsic mystery. 

This is indeed one of the purposes of a spiritual practice -- not to sit safely on the shore like the village atheist, nor to drown oneself in the ocean like the nondual mystic, but to ride these ceaseless waves of novelty from the depths of being to the shore of existence.

As Balthasar expresses it, we cannot look at the reality of undeveloped possibilities as "a realm of limitation and poverty." Rather, "the very purpose of this fullness in the womb of life is to illustrate life's richness and superabundance. It would betoken the poverty of being, and ultimately of the Creator, if everything possible were also actual" (emphasis mine).

Imagine the alternative: some musician might come along and write the last song, or a poet might compose the last poem: "That's it. We're done here. We've run out of songs and poems." 

But this can never happen. You can call it a privation, but it's also a mercy, for it means existence is a gift that never stops giving. The cosmic tank is always half full. 

Which is no doubt why we often inappropriately idealize artists, who seem to live on that shoreline between infinite potential and finite actuality. This is the dreamscape between thought and expression. To paraphrase someone, the Aeon is a child playing with colored balls along the shore.

In turn, the purpose of a secular indoctrination is to crush this natural mysticism and to replace the infinite world with godless abstractions and progressive concretions. Then, once the soul is sophicated, it projecst the "missing infinity" into time. Thus is born every spiritual perversion from leftism to scientism to liberation theology to gaia worship. It is the elevation of Ø to O.

However, it isn't exactly correct to say that the infinite cannot be found in the finite, for in truth, this is the only place it can be found -- just as it is impossible to locate substance in the absence of form. Rather, form is precisely where you will find the substance, and vice versa. 

Thus, "the finite appearance as such is the coming to light of a certain infinity." The realization of finitude is at once the "revelation of its intrinsic infinity. This infinity truly becomes visible in its appearance as the excess that does not become visible." Again, finite reality always sings to us as if it's got an extra tank of Texaco in its tummy.

As such, any knowledge is surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which gives it its... tang. Again, imagine how dreadful life would be if there were some one-to-one correspondence between object and subject. Obviously, subject and object are stuck with each other until death do they part, but a statically bi-polar situation would be a marriage made in hell.

And that's no joke, for Raccoon Hell is a place where everything simply is what it is, with no remainder. Knowledge of any kind is always surrounded on all sides by the great unKnown.

This latter is surely "known," only not in an explicit manner. It is this unKnowledge that allows us to tend toward the actualization of a self which can never be fully known to us. It is reminiscent of the "luminous darkness"of faith, which allows us to approach the unKnown God who is increasingly known without ever exhuststing his knowability.  

Thirst runs out before the water does. --NGD

Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You

Back in the day, I used to occasionally dredge the arkive and pull up a moldy artifact worthy of a re-read. 

After, all, these posts are never intended to be timebound, otherwise why bother? Nothing is more disposable than yesterday's news, so even when a post is oriented around the hysteria of the moment, it is in order to elucidate a deeper principle. If they're only about the left's daily tantrum, to hell with it. Who needs another voice yelling at you about things you can see with your own three eyes?

There were other excuses. For example, presumably few folks read the blog every day, let alone every year or decade, so for them an old post will be as new. 

For that matter, these decroded posts might as well be new to me, since they're banged out spontaneously in a certain frame of mind. Reading is very much a different mode, i.e., receptive but critical vs. expressive and perhaps a tad forgiving. 

Rereading a post allows me to view it with more critical distance and see if it passes the current sniff test. If something smells off, I can excise the rotten part and perhaps save the rest of the post from infection. Moreover, I inevitably encounter cringworthy passages I can blot from the Akashic record. 

The bottom line is, I really have no idea what's down there, so I'm as surprised as anyone else.

And frankly, at the moment I have nothing new to report, just the same old counter narrative. When this occurs, I never know if it's the end of the blog or just the end of a cycle. In any event, it affords me the opportunity to look down and back. Gnostalgia. 

Now, these are dark times. But so too was Obama's previous reign -- or incarnation, rather -- so I thought to myself, why not go back exactly 12 years and see what we were going on about? Maybe we can learn something, if only this too shall pass. No doubt into something even worse.  

Here it is, March 30, 2009:  Surfing the Eternal Waves of Novelty to the Sands of Time: 

We were discussing the freedom of the object -- which in itself is a strange sounding notion, being that we usually think of freedom as residing only in the subject, if indeed we acknowledge spiritual freedom at all. 

To put it another way, if the subject weren't free, then it would not only be an object, but we would have no name for it. Or any other names, for that matter. Bottom line: to say object is to say subject. Now, one of these must be prior, and it surely isn't the former.

The infinite plenitude of the object world reminds me of something I once read on the back of a Sinatra album by the king of comedically bad liner notes, a man named Stan Cornyn. 

For you youngsters out there, vinyl albums used to have an essay on back about the music therein, sometimes by a critic or celebrity, other times by an obsequious PR flack such as Cornyn. Although Frank -- overly harshly, in my opinion -- dismissed the song as "a piece of Shit," Cornyn enthused that Sinatra's phrasing   

comes out mmmmmmmmm all the way. If he runs out of gas on a phrase, which is a very rare bird for the man, then he runs out of gas two-and-a-half miles after anybody else would. He sings like he's got an extra tank of Texaco in his tummy (emphasis mine).

That's the point we're driving at: the object world always appears to us as if it's got an extra tank in its tummy: no matter how much we know, there's always more to be known. The tank never reaches empty, or we would be as God.

When we look at the world "the possibilities of life are infinitely more abundant than what is actually on display.... There is an incomprehensible prodigality in the very essence of life" (Balthasar). 

I remember something Whitehead said along similar lines -- that out of the infinite pool of possibilities, only a relative few undergo the formality of becoming. Potential is infinite. Reality is finite. Or, time is the serial crystallization of possibility.

Of course, the higher up the ladder we ascend, the more this becomes apparent. For example, one of our unavoidable limitations -- or sad conditions of existence -- is that a single lifetime can never be sufficient to actualize all that is latent within us. D'oh!

In the words of the Aphorist: The intellectual capital of the adult is often restricted to a small lottery he won in adolescence.

This is an odd situation that should be noticed by more people, but I think the problem is that most people foreclose their infinite potential so early in life, they don't really feel the sting, except in a vague or displaced manner. 

Then again, it would be a waste of timelessness to dwell on this inherent lack, because life itself floats atop this infinite sea of potential. Imagine if existence were as simplistic as imagined by the metaphysical Darwinist or bonehead atheist, deprived of its intrinsic mystery. 

This is indeed one of the purposes of a spiritual practice -- not to sit safely on the shore like the village atheist, nor to drown oneself in the ocean like the nondual mystic, but to ride these ceaseless waves of novelty from the depths of being to the shore of existence.

As Balthasar expresses it, we cannot look at the reality of undeveloped possibilities as "a realm of limitation and poverty." Rather, "the very purpose of this fullness in the womb of life is to illustrate life's richness and superabundance. It would betoken the poverty of being, and ultimately of the Creator, if everything possible were also actual" (emphasis mine).

Imagine the alternative: some musician might come along and write the last song, or a poet might compose the last poem: "That's it. We're done here. We've run out of songs and poems." 

But this can never happen. You can call it a privation, but it's also a mercy, for it means existence is a gift that never stops giving. The cosmic tank is always half full. 

Which is no doubt why we often inappropriately idealize artists, who seem to live on that shoreline between infinite potential and finite actuality. This is the dreamscape between thought and expression. To paraphrase someone, the Aeon is a child playing with colored balls along the shore.

In turn, the purpose of a secular indoctrination is to crush this natural mysticism and to replace the infinite world with godless abstractions and progressive concretions. Then, once the soul is sophicated, it projecst the "missing infinity" into time. Thus is born every spiritual perversion from leftism to scientism to liberation theology to gaia worship. It is the elevation of Ø to O.

However, it isn't exactly correct to say that the infinite cannot be found in the finite, for in truth, this is the only place it can be found -- just as it is impossible to locate substance in the absence of form. Rather, form is precisely where you will find the substance, and vice versa. 

Thus, "the finite appearance as such is the coming to light of a certain infinity." The realization of finitude is at once the "revelation of its intrinsic infinity. This infinity truly becomes visible in its appearance as the excess that does not become visible." Again, finite reality always sings to us as if it's got an extra tank of Texaco in its tummy.

As such, any knowledge is surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which gives it its... tang. Again, imagine how dreadful life would be if there were some one-to-one correspondence between object and subject. Obviously, subject and object are stuck with each other until death do they part, but a statically bi-polar situation would be a marriage made in hell.

And that's no joke, for Raccoon Hell is a place where everything simply is what it is, with no remainder. Knowledge of any kind is always surrounded on all sides by the great unKnown.

This latter is surely "known," only not in an explicit manner. It is this unKnowledge that allows us to tend toward the actualization of a self which can never be fully known to us. It is reminiscent of the "luminous darkness"of faith, which allows us to approach the unKnown God who is increasingly known without ever exhuststing his knowability.  

Thirst runs out before the water does. --NGD

Top Doc Reveals the Secret of Endless Creativity!

The previous two posts promised to reveal the One Weird Secret, but got sidetracked along the way. In order to prevent this from happening again, I'm going to reveal the secret at the beginning and take it from there: relativity in divinis. 

I'm not sure why Schuon translates it into Latin. To make it sound more venerable, I suppose. There's a tendency among traditionalists to root their ideas in antiquity, when they are actually quite modern and even postmodern -- in a manner of speaking -- bearing in mind that this designation has nothing to do with the calendar per se. "Transmodern" would be a better term, for transcendence is timeless. 

For this reason, you will search in vain for a "premodern" traditionalist. For one thing, no one in the premodern world knew of other traditions, at least in any deep and intimate way. Or, there was a name for other traditions: wrong; or ignorant, barbaric, heathen, haram, not exactly kosher, etc.  No one attempted to delineate the abstract and nonlocal metaphysical principles of which this or that religion is the local expression. 

Some thinkers touched on it, but didn't pursue it very far -- Augustine, for example, who claimed that "that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist." In short, the principles have always been present, but known implicitly and imperfectly. 

Thomas too gets close but then pulls back. Let me see if I can find a quick example without getting lost in the weeds. This one is pretty darn abstract:

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe.

For which reason Schuon often repeats the gag that "there is no higher privilege than truth." Wait -- what about love? I appreciate the sentiment, but unfortunately man is able to love wrongly while still loving. Don't even get me started on my first girlfriend. In other words, we can love the wrong persons, ideas, or things. We can also have a disproportionate love, as Jesus often reminds us.

But intelligence is the conformity of mind to truth. We cannot know truth wrongly. Of course, we can know it partially, but we can't literally "know falsehood," because this is the opposite of knowledge. This latter occurs because the intellect is clouded by passion, or interest, or pride, or leftism, or some other crosscurrent. 

There are also levels of truth -- recall the image of the concentric circles -- but these are nested in higher truths (ones closer to the center) that determine the lower. No lower truth can fundamentally contradict a higher truth, despite the efforts of atheists and progressives to anchor their truths in something lower than Truth itself.

A few weeks ago I was discussing some of my reservations regarding Garrigou's strict Thomism, which characterizes God as immutably immutable, AKA radical changelessness. For me, this creates a host of problems, some intellectual, others more personal -- for example, how does one relate to a God who cannot relate to us (for to "relate" is to be relative to)? Why pray to a fixed God, and how can "create" and "immutable" be reconciled?  How can there be something other than God?

Of course, there are attempts to explain these things, but they remind me of the effort to save the appearances of geocentricity with an appeal to epicycles within epicycles, or the Newtonian system that eventually had to posit unknown variables to make it work. 

Maybe the truth is more prosaic -- that everything (every positive reality) has its analogue in God, only preeminently. Come to think of it, what is creativity but a kind of eminent change? Certainly it isn't difficult to understand it as a "perfection" in which we have the privilege of participating. Otherwise all change is bad, including the creation. But God himself said it was good!

Anyway, I had a fruitful back-and-forth with a reader on this subject, and I couldn't express it more eloquently than he did:

Well, the relativity of God is, precisely, what makes the world possible, along with a human consciousness that renders it intelligible. Of course, that does not preclude a non-relative dimension to the Absolute which is also necessary. The challenge is not to confuse metaphysical levels. 

Clearly there is a mutable aspect to the Divine, without which the relative could never arise (along with the imperfection we find in the world). But if the essence of God were only mutable, then the traditional notion of deity would go out the window. As Schuon remind us, we have to accept that there are two phases to ultimate reality -- an unmanifested mode and a manifested one (the latter being a necessary and ‘dynamic’ consequence of his infinity). 

Therefore, there must be attributes and qualities of God that do not change (His goodness, mercy, beauty, eternity, beatitude etc.) -- without which we cannot meaningfully speak of an Absolute at all -- but, at the same, we cannot deny the reality before our eyes that discloses a world that is evidently not God (“My Kingdom is not of this world”) but which, in the final analysis, cannot be other than God (i.e. in a limited or privative mode). 

Accordingly, any kind of ‘radical immutability’ is not tenable. We must, therefore, only speak of a qualified immutability that allows for the relative ontological reality of the world and man (which remain divine manifestations). Otherwise, one is left with the unsatisfying Vedantic notion that the created order is nothing but an illusory maya which is equally untenable.

To be continued... 

Top Doc Reveals the Secret of Endless Creativity!

The previous two posts promised to reveal the One Weird Secret, but got sidetracked along the way. In order to prevent this from happening again, I'm going to reveal the secret at the beginning and take it from there: relativity in divinis. 

I'm not sure why Schuon translates it into Latin. To make it sound more venerable, I suppose. There's a tendency among traditionalists to root their ideas in antiquity, when they are actually quite modern and even postmodern -- in a manner of speaking -- bearing in mind that this designation has nothing to do with the calendar per se. "Transmodern" would be a better term, for transcendence is timeless. 

For this reason, you will search in vain for a "premodern" traditionalist. For one thing, no one in the premodern world knew of other traditions, at least in any deep and intimate way. Or, there was a name for other traditions: wrong; or ignorant, barbaric, heathen, haram, not exactly kosher, etc.  No one attempted to delineate the abstract and nonlocal metaphysical principles of which this or that religion is the local expression. 

Some thinkers touched on it, but didn't pursue it very far -- Augustine, for example, who claimed that "that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist." In short, the principles have always been present, but known implicitly and imperfectly. 

Thomas too gets close but then pulls back. Let me see if I can find a quick example without getting lost in the weeds. This one is pretty darn abstract:

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe.

For which reason Schuon often repeats the gag that "there is no higher privilege than truth." Wait -- what about love? I appreciate the sentiment, but unfortunately man is able to love wrongly while still loving. Don't even get me started on my first girlfriend. In other words, we can love the wrong persons, ideas, or things. We can also have a disproportionate love, as Jesus often reminds us.

But intelligence is the conformity of mind to truth. We cannot know truth wrongly. Of course, we can know it partially, but we can't literally "know falsehood," because this is the opposite of knowledge. This latter occurs because the intellect is clouded by passion, or interest, or pride, or leftism, or some other crosscurrent. 

There are also levels of truth -- recall the image of the concentric circles -- but these are nested in higher truths (ones closer to the center) that determine the lower. No lower truth can fundamentally contradict a higher truth, despite the efforts of atheists and progressives to anchor their truths in something lower than Truth itself.

A few weeks ago I was discussing some of my reservations regarding Garrigou's strict Thomism, which characterizes God as immutably immutable, AKA radical changelessness. For me, this creates a host of problems, some intellectual, others more personal -- for example, how does one relate to a God who cannot relate to us (for to "relate" is to be relative to)? Why pray to a fixed God, and how can "create" and "immutable" be reconciled?  How can there be something other than God?

Of course, there are attempts to explain these things, but they remind me of the effort to save the appearances of geocentricity with an appeal to epicycles within epicycles, or the Newtonian system that eventually had to posit unknown variables to make it work. 

Maybe the truth is more prosaic -- that everything (every positive reality) has its analogue in God, only preeminently. Come to think of it, what is creativity but a kind of eminent change? Certainly it isn't difficult to understand it as a "perfection" in which we have the privilege of participating. Otherwise all change is bad, including the creation. But God himself said it was good!

Anyway, I had a fruitful back-and-forth with a reader on this subject, and I couldn't express it more eloquently than he did:

Well, the relativity of God is, precisely, what makes the world possible, along with a human consciousness that renders it intelligible. Of course, that does not preclude a non-relative dimension to the Absolute which is also necessary. The challenge is not to confuse metaphysical levels. 

Clearly there is a mutable aspect to the Divine, without which the relative could never arise (along with the imperfection we find in the world). But if the essence of God were only mutable, then the traditional notion of deity would go out the window. As Schuon remind us, we have to accept that there are two phases to ultimate reality -- an unmanifested mode and a manifested one (the latter being a necessary and ‘dynamic’ consequence of his infinity). 

Therefore, there must be attributes and qualities of God that do not change (His goodness, mercy, beauty, eternity, beatitude etc.) -- without which we cannot meaningfully speak of an Absolute at all -- but, at the same, we cannot deny the reality before our eyes that discloses a world that is evidently not God (“My Kingdom is not of this world”) but which, in the final analysis, cannot be other than God (i.e. in a limited or privative mode). 

Accordingly, any kind of ‘radical immutability’ is not tenable. We must, therefore, only speak of a qualified immutability that allows for the relative ontological reality of the world and man (which remain divine manifestations). Otherwise, one is left with the unsatisfying Vedantic notion that the created order is nothing but an illusory maya which is equally untenable.

To be continued...