Cosmic Anthropology and Anthropic Cosmology

Or, you might say that man is the key to God, and God the key to man. No, that's not an absurcular argument.

I didn't discover John Scottus Eriugena until after I had already written my book, but he provides a perfect Christian template for what I was trying to accomplish there, with the idea of the cosmic procession and return to the apophatic Godhead, and with "evolution" being that which takes place in between the two big Nothings at either end (which are of course the same "place").

I'm going to try to summarize his theology and point out the parallels, which I don't know if I can do, since I've never done it before. Our tour guide will be Bernard McGinn, who has a chapter devoted to Scotty in volume two of his history of Christian mysticism, The Presence of God.

By way of background -- let's just call him John -- John was born in Ireland in around 810. I don't really know how he is regarded these days -- as in literature, people go in and out of fashion as their reputations go up and down -- but it seems to me that he provides a critical link between eastern and western forms of Christianity, since his main influences were such luminaries as Denys the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor -- two of the early Fathers who were also among the biggest influences on Toots Mondello, as he feverishly transcribed the Summa Raccoonica from the white salamander Gabriel.

McGinn calls him -- John that is, not Toots -- "the greatest speculative mind of the early Middle Ages, the most original and subtle thinker in the West between Augustine and Anselm." That's a hell of a long time. Imagine being "the Man" for 600 years! Think about it: can you name a contemporary author who will not only be relevant but still cutting edge in 600 years? No, not Richard Dawkins or Deepak Chopra.

John's overall intention in his theology was identical to mine: "The Irishman's thought, from start to finish, was intended to provide an account of how the cosmos, through the mediation of the human subject, returns to its fullest possible unification with the hidden God."

Also, note that he had the identical attitude toward truth that I discussed in yesterday's post, i.e., that all truth comes from God, whether or not it looks like it on the surface. As he put it, "True philosophy is true religion and true religion is true philosophy" (and back then, philosophy encompassed the totality of natural knowledge).

Thus, John's body of work provides "a systematic account of all reality, or of nature," and "since God is the source of both reason and the Bible, there can be no real conflict between the two." Of course, "seeming conflicts will occur," but "essential conflict is impossible," since Truth is of one essence -- or the essence of One.

On the one hand, scripture is "God's speech about himself." But John does not reduce scripture to the Bible. Rather, there is a parallel revelation called "creation," i.e., the wor(l)d: "John stressed that creation and scripture were two parallel manifestations of the hidden God..."

Furthermore, scripture only became "necessary" on account of the Fall, which John interprets allegorically as a state of ignorance resulting in "the inability of humanity as we know and experience it to grasp its true relationship with God." That being the case, we also have difficulty reading the "book of creation." Thus, a certain kind of development will allow us to comprehend and unify both God and cosmos on the interior plane.

In fact, you might say that it is the Fall that "triggers" history and makes it necessary, so to speak. The Fall results in the exteriorization or dissipation of our divine interior, which necessitates the long arc -- or is it actually short, relative to cosmic time? -- of salvation history (or what I call salvolution, i.e., salvation + evolution).

We will return to this idea later. The main point is that "illusion and ignorance... can only be overcome historically" through the incarnation of the God-man "whose task it is to incorporate all of humanity into him and thus restore it at history's end to the Father." Again, as in the title of yesterday's post, timelessness takes time, which in turn takes a cosmos: the end result is cosmotheosis (again, more below).

I hope this is all making sense so far. It certainly does for me, another reminder of how there exist "divine attractors" which people separated by centuries or millennia can occupy at the same timeless. As a matter of fact -- and this is an idea shared by Eckhart -- when you are in that particular attractor, you are actually making it "present" by explicating it -- or trying to, anyway.

In other words, "the return to God is not only spiritually foreshadowed, but actually performed in the exegetical process." Thus, for me to communicate and for you to comprehend all of this is a kind of miniature version -- or fractal -- of the whole cosmic process. It is O --> (n), which is ultimately O --> O, or God contemplating and knowing himself through the human medium.

And of course, it can only take place "within" the Holy Spirit. But the point is that we are not dealing with any kind of objective (k) that can be handed from mind to mind, but a transformation. In other words, I am trying to speak from the space of O --> (n), and if I am successful in my communication, it will facilitate the transformation of (n) --> O for you.

True gnosis is presence. It is of a sacramental nature, except that instead of actualizing sanctity it actualizes the presence of divine truth. Thus, you should be able to feel God's breath, or pneuma, as you approach, or "enter" the space of O. We call this breath holytosis.

This is one of the reasons why it is so critical to maintain an apophatic stance toward God, i.e., an unsaturated stance of unKnowing. This is probably a good place to stop for today, because that will require some time to explain.

It Takes a Cosmos: My Evolving Thoughts on Evolution

This is a continuation of yesterday's post, originally published two years ago. I wanted to revisit it to see if my thinking on the subject of cosmic evolution has evolved. There is quite a bit of added material.

The fundamental evil that besets us... is our incapacity to see the whole. --Teilhard de Chardin

An anonymous commenter yesterday criticized me for lowering myself to the level of a mainstream, "exoteric" Christian, N.T. Wright. First, no esoterist considers himself superior to those with a more traditional, exoteric point of view. In fact, of the two of us, they are the more important, because they preserve the embattled vertical message through the ravages of horizontal time. Without them, it is very unlikely that we'd be here talking about the Christian vision. The same is especially true of Judaism. Imagine the moral courage of the many generations of Jews who kept the traditions alive and in tact, so that they can be studied esoterically. Unlike the ungrateful tenured, we know that bullets come before poetry and guns before academic freedom.

Secondly, I thought my larger point was obvious -- that mainstream Christianity is an esoterism; in fact, as Schuon has remarked, it is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism. In the absence of the "esoteric key," it scarcely makes any sense at all. My point is that it is not as if the esoterism is "hidden" or "secret." Rather, it is right out in the open. It is full of mystery, and mystery is a mode of God.

Perhaps some definitions would be helpful. What do we mean by "esoterism?" Let's begin with a little metaphysics: there are two realities; or, more precisely, one reality with two faces, the Absolute and the relative. As Schuon writes, "the idea that the Absolute has made itself relativity so that the relative may return to the Absolute" is the fundamental mystery of revelation. Revelation must address itself to the "average" mentality, taking into consideration its needs and limitations. Nevertheless, it contains "layers" of meaning that are more or less inexhaustible, while its deepest dimension conveys a universal teaching, or message, about existence.

It is not that the message of pure metaphysics can only be decoded by "special" people. Rather, to paraphrase Schuon, man by definition has two subjectivities, the ego and intellect: "the ego follows the divine attraction within the limits of its nature -- it can do nothing else -- whereas the intellect, also in accordance with its nature, opens itself to the [universal] Principle and realizes it; both ways combine while remaining independent of each other."

The ego is constrained by small-r reason, and cannot transcend its relatively narrow horizons, which are limited to assumptions and conclusions. But the esoteric perspective is rooted in intellectual intuition, which is our means of access to universal principles, or to "the nature of things." It extends from thinking to being -- or perhaps generative "thinking about being," what I call O-->(n). Thus, esoterism is simply the deep contemplation, comprehension, and assimilation of the religious message, which is Truth itself. You might say that it is the "metabolism of truth."

The fundamental mystery of revelation is that the Absolute has made itself relativity so that the relative may return to the Absolute. How does this accord with what we were discussing yesterday?

From the spiritual perspective, evolution can only be evolution toward divinity. In fact, that is the title of a book by Beatrice Bruteau which outlines the parallels between Teilhard de Chardin's "Christian evolutionism" and Sri Aurobindo's neo-Vedantic view. Interestingly, in his own lifetime, Teilhard was unaware of the parallels, and even thought that his theology was incompatible with the latter.

Bruteau writes that one of the purposes of her book was "to point out the irony of this situation by refuting Teilhard's criticisms and by showing how, on the contrary," the Vedantic contribution to world thought "could have been most advantageous to him if he had studied it with care." Evidently, Teilhard's slight knowledge of Vedanta caused him to characterize it as "a simplistic monism in which all multiplicity disappeared without leaving a trace."

Bruteau writes that Fr. Teilhard's "intellectual odyssey centered around his lifelong struggle to reconcile in his thought and in his career two attractions which he seems to have experienced equally strongly and which he initially felt to be divergent: the love of God, on the one hand, and, on the other, the love of the earth together with knowledge of the earth, which is science." In one of his early journals, he wrote of his struggle "to reconcile progress and detachment, a passionate and legitimate love of the earth's highest development and the exclusive quest for the kingdom of heaven. How can one be as much a Christian as any other man, and yet more a man than anyone?"

Clearly, Teilhard was attempting to reconcile the vertical and horizontal at their highest levels. While the Creator surely exists, "our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended." In a way, Teilhard was a "priest of the Cosmos" rather than just the earth. In fact, he said as much: "I should wish, Lord, in my very humble way, to be the apostle and, if I may ask so much, the evangelist of your Christ in the Universe." Later he wrote that he had "felt passing through me, in particularly exhilarating and varied conditions, the double stream of human and divine forces."

For Teilhard, true mysticism was "the great science and the great art, the only power capable of synthesizing the riches accumulated by other forms of human activity." Thus, he is naturally dismissed by ego-bound materialists, since they are generally incapable of comprehending the mystical experience at the heart of his cosmic vision.

For example, how is the common intellectual laborer to understand an observation such as, "God is at work within life. He helps it, raises it up, gives it the impulse that drives it along, the appetite that attracts it, the growth that transforms it. I can feel God, touch Him, 'live' Him in the deep biological current that runs through my soul and carries it with it." Or, "Everything in the universe is made by union and generation -- by the coming together of elements that seek out one another, melt together two by two, and are born again in a third." These mystical intuitions of Teilhard's are not "thought" but "seen" or even "felt": "The world, the whole world, is God's body in its fullest extension."

And, just like a body, it has an exterior and an interior horizon -- it is not possible to have the one without the other. Schuon and the traditionalists are quite harsh on both Teilhard and Aurobindo, and I do understand and appreciate where they're coming from. Let me also add that I am not arguing for "Teilhardism" or "Aurobindoism," since I believe both approaches have their flaws. Rather, I consider them to be early explorers simply doing their best to reconcile world and spirit, consciousness and matter, science and religion, temporal horizontal evolution and timeless vertical truth.

We can, like the traditionalists, simply dismiss scientific truth on a priori grounds, but I reject that approach for both tactical and epistemological/ontological reasons. That is, to reject the modern world will simply seal the irrelevance of religion, and therefore man's doom. And I am not prepared to give up on man. If you idealize the Dark Ages and want to live like a medieval man, no one is stopping you. Go for it! Start by turning off your computer so I don't have to deal with you. If I make you vomit, what are you doing here?

But more fundamentally, I firmly believe that "all truth comes from God." If it doesn't look like it on the surface, then that's our problem, not God's. We have to find a way to reconcile them. Which I don't think is all that difficult, really, so long as you're not thoroughly brainwashed by postmodern materialism. After all, humans are the living link between every possible mode and dimension of reality. We are matter, life, mind, and spirit.

As a matter of fact, Teilhard's idea of the "divine milieu" is quite similar -- gasp! -- to the traditionalist notion of the "cosmic ray" that extends from the divine ontological center of being to the periphery of the cosmos.

In an excellent biography of Teilhard, Spirit of Fire, (from which some of the above quotes are taken), King writes that Teilhard chose this expression "to describe the diffuse presence and influence of God at all levels of created reality, in all areas of human experience.... One can think of it as a field of divine energy that has one central focus -- God -- from which everything flows, is animated, and directed." As Teilhard wrote, "in no case could the cosmos be conceived, and realized, without a supreme center of spiritual consistence."

In my own book -- which you might say is my first approach at a comprehensive solution to the problems discussed in this post -- I wrote that human beings are "facts of the universe" which must be analyzed and evaluated cosmologically, for "discovering what a human being is is the key to fathoming the implacable mystery of the cosmos itself."

Along these lines, Teilhard observed that "There is a science of the universe without man. There is also a science of man as marginal to the universe; but there is not yet a science of the universe that embraces man as such. Present-day physics... does not yet give a place to thought; which means that it still exists in complete independence of the most remarkable phenomenon exposed by nature to our observation."

The question is, what is the place of Man in the cosmos? Science cannot help but dismiss man as a random and irrelevant side effect of impersonal cosmic forces, when I am quite convinced that the presence of the human dimension is the key to the whole existentialada. For Teilhard, the "big bang" of human consciousness is not a meaningless anomaly, but "a fundamental phenomenon -- the supreme phenomenon of nature," through which "universal evolution is not only experienced but lived by us." For no matter how "coldly and objectively we may study things, we must still conclude that humanity constitutes a front along which the cosmos advances."

I suppose this is a good place to leave off for today. See you at the front!

When all is said and done, I can see this: I managed to climb up to the point where the Universe became apparent to me as a great rising surge, [converging] ahead into into a single dazzling spearhead -- now, at the end of my life I can stand at the peak I have scaled and continue to look more closely into the future, and there, with ever more assurance, see the ascent of God. --Teilhard

Timelessness Takes Time

In selecting something to rewordgitate from two years back, I chose the one with the fewest comments. Of course, this potentially cuts both ways, for perhaps the absence of comments was a polite way of saying I shouldn't have reposted it the first time.

However, just by cooncidence, it touches on a bobjection raised by yesterday's dyspeptic troll, to the effect that there is no way to reconcile evolution and Christianity, and that any attempt to do so should induce vomiting in the faithful.

For the traditionalist, this is an a priori argument, in that there is no amount of evidence that can convince them that evolution has taken place. Their argument is "principial," in that they would essentially say that the greater cannot be derived from the lesser, whatever the empirical evidence.

I fully agree that the greater cannot be derived from the lesser. And yet, lower things routinely precede higher ones. For example, I can't help noticing that my son no longer fits into his test tube. But does this mean that the embryo produced the four year old -- who just woke up -- excuse me...

Back. So, contained within the DNA is a kind of arrow pointing toward its own destiny. Therefore, in some way that transcends the usual categories of biology, the future is "contained" in the present, since the organism always "strives" toward its own future.

In fact, one could say the exact same thing of the self. One of the central "streams" -- or timelines -- of spiritual development involves the discovery and articulation of the true self. Here again, your future is present to you, but must be actualized in time. You might say that time is the measure of the distance between you and your true self. Call it whatever you want, but this is an evolution, which literally means to "unroll," like an ancient scroll. Darwinians just appropriated and redefined this venerable word to make it synonymous with natural selection.

So, is the cosmos an unrolling play? Or is it a fixed game?

Anyway, on to the post....

So, is it possible to reconcile Christianity with the type of evolutionary cosmos envisioned by Sri Aurobindo?

Obviously, religion must have a context, or matrix. While the religious message is absolute, its cultural container is necessarily going to be relative. What makes it tricky for Christianity is that its "absolute message" is actually extended in time -- it is a story that continues to unfold in history. In other words, unlike, say, Vedanta, Taoism, or Buddhism, Christianity is intrinsically historical, which I believe offers us a clue right away as to its evolutionary nature.

As Wright explains [I just happened to be reading this book at the time; I don't recommend it], Jesus' appearance is the climax of a long story through which "a great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It's the door to the prison where we've been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God's rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access."

So, Christianity is fundamentally about a hole in the fabric of spacetime, through which certain "healing" energies flow: a hole into wholeness. In one sense, the creation of this hole is the end of the story: it is accomplished. But in another sense, it is only the beginning. The beginning of what?

Again, according to Wright, Jesus central proclamation was that the kingdom of God is at hand. At the time, people had certain ideas about what he meant by this, but they all turned out to be wrong. Obviously, many interpreted it in terms of traditional Jewish prophecy, of God restoring Israel and smiting her enemies. But "the whole point of Jesus' work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God's future into the present and make it stick there" (emphasis mine).

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit is given so that "we ordinary mortals can become, in a measure, what Jesus himself was: part of God's future arriving in the present; a place where heaven and earth meet; the means of God's kingdom going ahead" (emphasis mine).

The Spirit is given so that we might "share in the life and continuing work of Jesus himself," and "to begin the work of making God's future real in the present." This Spirit "comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born," so that to live as a Christian is "to live by the rules of God's future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one." Which is why Paul "speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee or down-payment of what is to come." He actually uses the Greek word for "engagement ring," as "a sign in the present for what is to come in the future."

Now then. We have several arresting ideas from the heart of Christianity through which we may look at the cosmos in evolutionary terms, as an unfolding drama of union with the creator -- or what I call cosmotheosis -- and of bringing the future into the present. Recall what I said above about my son's development. Is it the present moving into the future? Or is it, more mysteriously, the future drawing the present toward it -- or "reaching" down and back, like a reverse arrow of time?

There are two ways we can look at evolution: the secular way and the religious Way. It has always been understood that the secular way actually makes no philosophical or metaphysical sense, being that the greater cannot be derived from the lesser -- let alone something of the magnitude of the human subject. So, what are we doing here? The human subject is so superior to the physical cosmos that the gap between them is infinite.

As a matter of fact, it seems that the cosmos is hardly worthy of our being here. On the one hand this is a great source of existential pain and bewilderment, but on the other hand, perhaps it provides a clue into the true order of things. For as Schuon has written, "One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and of our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence":

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

The secular way of looking at evolution involves an arrow of time that moves only in the direction past --> future. Furthermore, the second law of thermodynamics maintains that the entire cosmos is "winding down," so to speak, although it does allow for local areas to temporarily violate the law. Thus, Life itself is a kind of cosmic scofflaw, but you can only be a fugitive from the law of averages for so long. Entropy prevails in the end. It's all ultimately meaningless and pointless.

At least according to the scientific view. The religious view maintains -- as implied by Wright's comments above -- that the ultimate source of our order is the future, not the past. Furthermore, there is an arrow of time that operates in the direction future --> present. That is, the divine future is ontologically real, and it is waiting to be born: in other words, timelessness takes time. Evolution is the means of God's kingdom going ahead and the work of making God's future real in the present.

On a personal level, Wright notes that "instead of being simply a part of the old [entropic] creation, a place of sorrow and injustice and ultimately the shame of death itself, you can both be a part of the new creation in advance and someone through whom it begins to happen here and now."

You may not be able to know the future, but you can be the future. For as Andrew Louth writes, "the central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas or concepts, but a matter of fact, or reality.... To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something."

I would say to become something, and thereby actualize your future.

To be continued....

Saving the World, One Assoul at a Time

I'd like to try to complete my thoughts on Sherrard before moving on. The last chapter is entitled The Renewal of the Tradition of Contemplative Spirituality, and I think the ideas it espouses are only critical to the future survival of mankind. Put it this way: only the United States can save the world. In turn, only a renewal of classical liberal conservatism can save the United States. But only Christianity can save conservative liberalism -- including from Republicans.

But what will save Christianity? It sounds odd to say it, but it seems that Christianity is as much in need of salvation as its adherents. After all, one routinely reads in the MSM that Barack Obama is a "committed Christian." As are Al Sharpton, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. If that is the case, then there is obviously something wrong with Christianity -- or at least how it is commonly understood. There is something scandalous about a theology that is so elastic that people with polar opposite values can claim to adhere to it.

So we have to resolve that problem, and the best way to do so is to return to a more interior understanding of Christianity, as originally intended. Anyone can go through the motions and pretend to be Christian. But as John reminds us, one thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside.

As mentioned a few posts back, Sherrard begins with the idea that "to know oneself may be said to be a condition of knowing God." But "if one cannot know God without knowing oneself, one also cannot know oneself without knowing God." Therefore, "to be ignorant of oneself is to fail to achieve an authentic human life." But equally, "to be ignorant of God is to fail to achieve an authentic human life."

Thus, we are far beyond -- or beneath or behind -- issues of dogma. Rather, we are into the realms of psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. But not for their own sake. Rather, each of these disciplines specifically bears on spirit. Detached from spirit -- from God -- they have absolutely no intrinsic meaning whatsoever. They are just mind games.

Even on secular grounds, how could one ever claim to understand "reality" without understanding the nature of the knower? Let's take the mundane example of the Darwinian fundamentalist who blindly insists that everything is reducible to the random copying errors of natural selection. Fine. But tell me now, who -- or what -- is speaking? What in your philosophy permits random error to result in this thing you call "truth"? And what is the relationship between truth and the copying error you claim to be?

As you can see, Darwinism results in an "impossible" psychology and therefore an impossible mankind. The problem is, it explains everything on one level at the cost of unexplaining -- destroying, really -- every autonomous level above it.

It's the same with Marxism in all its varieties, including the crypto-Marxism of Dear Leader. In explaining history, it unexplains psychology, economics, religion, and pretty much everything else. It results in a worthless man -- worthless to himself, to God, and to other men -- as history proves again and again. And if America cannot save the world from Marxism, we will have a world of worthless men -- either infrahuman or "all too human," depending upon how you look at it.

America's founders knew that man only derived his value by virtue of his relationship to the Absolute. This is a fine example of how metaphysics -- the eternal science -- is enfolded in religion. For to see -- and it is a seeing, not a mere "knowing" -- that men are endowed by their Creator with life and liberty is to affirm that life and liberty have an absolute and infinite value. They are "unalienable." Anything short of this makes our rights quite alienable indeed, meaning, among other things, that we can surrender them to liberals for cash and other valuable prizes.

But like it or not, man is "condemned to the Absolute," and with it, to the infinite and eternal. Our intrinsic rights are not to be understood in some postmodern ultra-individualistic manner, as if liberty -- or life, or truth, or beauty -- could ever be detached from its divine source. Rather, the Creator is the source and therefore end of our liberty. To fail to understand this is to not know what a Christian is or what an American is. Period. Anything short of this is a perversion of truth. Man is free because he is potentially Truth + Will, or "truth in action."

But truth is only possible in light of the Absolute. In the absence of the Absolute there is only relativity and therefore no freedom, only a kind of "eternal lostness" that the left conflates with freedom. Such a man has no right to exist, being that rights can only be grounded in the Absolute, and this grounding carries with it certain responsibilities. Or, one could say that he is "responsible for Nothing," the ontological nothingness in which he is situated.

Let's return to the principles enunciated in the first paragraph before this post spins out of control. If it is true that only Christianity can save conservative liberalism, only individual self-knowledge can save Christianity. In a certain paradoxical manner -- about which we will have more to say later -- only man can "save" God. After all, God cannot -- or will not -- force you to believe. And if one can only know God interiorly, it is ultimately the colonization of our own interior space that will "save the world."

I don't know if that last claim sounds extravagant, but I take it quite literally. For the analytically informed psychologist, it is simply a truism that what is not known will be acted out. Thus, the less personal insight one possesses, the more likely one is to act out one's mind parasites in a pathological, impulsive, aggressive, sexual, envious, greedy, and/or self-defeating manner. This is why the Raccoon credo is Saving the world, one assoul at a time. You, of course, are the assoul.

Well, that didn't get far. To be continued.....

The Piper's Calling You to Join Him On the Stairway to Help

No time to change the road I'm on. A heavy muddle of a post from one year back....

There is the external world, there are nervous systems, and there is the space in between. That’s it.

That ladder transitional space is where everything happens and where everything evolves (i.e., where evolution can know of and thereby transcend itself). Other animals do not live in this space, or barely so. Rather, they more or less live in their nervous systems, which are “designed” only to notice certain aspects of the environment -- those necessary for immediate survival (and survival of the physical graffiti of the genes).

The more primitive the animal, the more there tends to be a deterministic, one-to-one relationship between information and environment. This is pretty much to be a rock and not to roll, at least on one's own power. Lower animals obviously possess will, but not free will. Only man possesses will + intelligence, which is to say, freedom -- which marks the infinite distance between a potted Plant and a written Page.

With Homo sapiens, a sub-universe or microcosmos somehow opened up in the gap between world and neurology, which became the new virtual environment for humanness to take root. Here, for the first time, the forest echoes with laughter. Ho!

To a certain extent, the emergence of psychological space is analogous to the sudden appearance of biological life some 3.85 billion years ago, when the levee of cosmic evolution truly broke. Prior to that -- for the first 10 billion years or so -- the cosmos simply was what it was -- a single level reality apparently consisting only of exterior, material processes. There was nothing there to witness the meaningless pageant, no voices of those who stand looking. There was quite literally no there there, since there was no particular point of view through which to look. There was only all places at once, even though there weren't actually any places. We can only know of the many things and places in hindsight. But there they were. And here they are. But how did I get here?

Prior to the emergence of life, there weren’t any qualities either, since every quality is in relation to a subject. As I noted in the Wholly Coonifesto, the cosmos obviously didn’t “look” like anything, since vision is a property of eyes. Physicists say it was very hot, but not really. Only in relationship to the cool and ironic physicists of the present day.

Nor was it large or small. It was just... a truly inconceivable nothing, for as Big Al Whitehead wrote, “apart from the experience of subjects, there is nothing, bare nothingness.” It almost makes one feel a bit dazed and confused, for however we think about or visualize this nothing, it’s just us projecting our ideas and images about it within the above-referenced transitional space. It is only within this transitional space that the cosmos can know itself, explore its qualities, and contemplate its own birth and even death. Without us, the stores would all be closed and we could never get what we came for. And yet, it makes me wonder...

The point is that, with the sudden emergence of life, the cosmos now had the makings of an inside, an entirely novel ontological category that cannot be accounted for by physics. Science can account for a lot of things, but one thing for which it can never account is the shocking presence of an inside, of a cosmic withinness, of an interior presence in the midst of what had only been an “exterior” up to the emergence of life.

Prior to that, the song had remained the same for billions of years -- the universe had no freedom, no destiny, no meaning beyond itself. But the appearance of life represents the dawn of all those modalities, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world and a stairway to heaven -- which, if you are not all but rendered insensate by scientolatry, should cause a little bustle in your hedgerow, to say the least.

We are all beneficiaries of that tiny window that cracked open almost four billion years ago, when some small part of the cosmos, instead of entropically dissipating into blind nothingness, wrapped around itself, bound up time and space, declared its independence, and went on being. In order to achieve this outrageous act, these whirling little dynamos -- cosmic heroes each and every one -- had to establish a continuous exchange with the “outside” in order to maintain their dancing days on the edge of nonbeing.

Of course, we don’t like to think about it, but for all of us, life is always that same little traveling catastrophe on the invisible border between being and nonbeing. We do what we can to tilt our spinning joyroscape toward the being side, but we can’t really resolve the tension, any more than we can slow down the rotation of the earth by digging in our heels. In order to be at all, we can only be in that fragile space between being and nonbeing, and hope that the piper will lead us to reason.

Or so it seems on first consideration, based only upon our natural reason. But surely you know that sometimes words have two meanings, and we have already established the fact that our natural reason can only go so far in explaining ourselves to oursophs. That is, we only pretend to understand what it means for the cosmos to have an inside that comprehends logic, just as we only pretend to understand what Life actually is.

A living inside. What could that mean? Isn’t that what we really want to know? What is this transitional space, this living inside that we all inhabit? In through this out door flows music, poetry, paintings, mathematical equations, jokes, dreams, and a whole lotta love -- and then it closes. But does the space disappear with it? Or is it somehow anterior to our entrance into it?

Perhaps that is the question. In one sense, there are some provocative signs on the wall, but we want to be sure. What is the nature of this space that we are privileged to enter and inhabit during our human journey from nothing to nowhere and back again? Because curiously, from the scientific (actually, scientistic) standpoint, this space shouldn’t contain any objective reality. At most, it can only be a fleeting secondary or derivative reality, like rings of smoke through the trees wafting up from the primary reality -- which is purely material. But if that were the case, how is it that the mental space we inhabit is in fact a realm of universal truths and values?

Let’s start with something basic, say the handful of mathematical equations that govern the character and evolution of the cosmos. Where are these equations, and where were they before there was even a cosmos for them to operate on? In short, where does mathematical truth reside? Maybe that’s too easy a question.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Hold it right there, Tom -- don’t even go beyond that. When you say that these truths are self-evident, how do you know that? What an preposterous thing to say. What is the nature of the entity that supposedly knows, and what is the nature of the truth it alleggedly apprehends?

And yet, we know it. The uncorrupted intellect knows because it sees, not with eyes that evolved to transduce light waves into visual images, but with a transpersonal eye that was created to see primordial and Absolute truth. We can know these moral or artistic or scriptural truths just as clearly and absolutely as we can know any scientific truth. “Thou shall not murder” or “All men are created equal” are as clear to the transrational moral eye as 2 + 2 = 4 or "never throw a 3 and 2 curveball to the pitcher" are to the rational eye. In each of the above cases, the mind -- which by all rights should be subjective and conditioned -- is able to peer into the absolute and partake of its qualities.

The gulf between human beings and other animals is virtually infinite because of our ability to conceive of the absolute and to know eternal truth in light of it. In this regard, we truly are made in the image of the absolute and infinite One -- the Interior of the interior and its Houses of the Holy: the Truth of truth, Beauty of beauty, Being of being, Life of All, A Love Supreme, Om, now I remurmur! The cosmos is in the Self, not vice versa, for that is truly a truth that can notnot be, or we couldn't ether.

For

There are two paths you can go by
but in the long run
there's still time to change the road you're on

and

If you listen very hard
the tune will come to you at last
when all are one and one is all

Say, What's God Like, Anyway?

From a couple years ago...

What kind of God is God? What's he like, anyway? I suppose that's an easy enough question to answer in 45 minutes.

But I think I'll evade the question head on, because one can only unswer it by questing indirectly. In this regard, it is very much analogous to psychoanalytic therapy. If you ask, "what is the unconscious like?," the question cannot be answered except in a theoretical way.

Rather, you must begin by free associating in the presence of another person called a "psychoanalyst," and the answer will gradually emerge in the space in between. In other words, you attempt to bypass the ego by saying whatever comes to mind in an uncensored way, through which the ghostly contours of your own unconscious will become apparent. In short, this hidden dimension will not stand out until you stand in it.

And you can never know it in its essence, only in its energies, as a gregory palamine might say. It is never revealed by speech, only reveiled. It's a little strange, because you can see by the shape of the veil what's underneath, but if you strip away the veil, it vanishes.

This is why Bion stopped using the word "unconscious," because it fooled us into believing we knew what it was just because we had a word for it. Rather, he called it "O," standing for the ultimate unknowable reality. In my book, I simply extended this idea to religion and spirituality, since the plain fact of the matter is that we have no idea what existence, life, or consciousness "are" in their essence. If you ask "what is life?," the only real answer is the life you are living. Likewise, if you ask "what is consciousness?," there is no answer outside consciousness itself. Nothing less than consciousness can explain consciousness, just as nothing less than your life can describe it.

In a way, each of my posts is a free association in O. Therefore, if you ask me "what's God like?," you would have to go back and read all of my posts, and who would want to do that? But now that I'm thinking about it, the analogy with psychoanalysis holds up, since I acknowledge up front that I am no theologian or any kind of special person with special knowledge.

Rather, I simply rise each morning and undergo the task of focusing a beam of intense darkness on O -- or, as Joyce put it, to shed a little obscurity on ultimate reality. It's almost like trying to paint an invisible subject, and in fact, I suppose I feel some kinship with the original abstract expressionists such as Kandinsky, who attempted to depict the implicate reality beneath reality -- or out of which -- explicate reality emerges, like the pulse beneath the rhythm.

Meister Eckhart, whom we were discussing yesterday, is among those bifocal visionaries who comes closest to myOpia. Bear in mind that much of what he wrote sounds shocking (it certainly was to the religious authorities of the time), but he is playing with language in a very modern way, trying to provoke an experience in O through such techniques as paradox, oxymoron, hyperbole, word games, puns, and negation.

As McGinn writes [BTW, I see that that book has become rather expensive; much of the same material is summarized here], Eckhart was attempting to use language to overcome language -- or "to confuse in order to enlighten" -- an idea Bion would have endorsed. He saw "the very act of preaching as creation of the word to be heard by others so that they too may find the source from whence the word is formed mirrors the 'event character' of the God-world relation." In short, Eckhart's sermons and writings are the essence of O-->(n), not for the purposes of conveying mere information (k) to the reader, but to simulate the same experience in oneself. [This is also the essence of Orthodox theology as laid down by the thrice great Gregory Palamas, which we will soon be discussing.]

McGinn continues: "But the preacher cannot really convey the message that lies hidden behind all words, and even beyond the Divine Word himself in the hidden depth of deity, unless he himself has participated in this inner speaking, that is, unless he speaks 'out of the ground' of God.... Eckhart invites his audience to hear what he has heard and to become one with him in the one ground -- 'If you could perceive things with my heart,' he once said, 'you would well understand what I say; for it is true and the Truth itself speaks it.'" Eckhart does not appeal to his own authority, but "out of the oneness of Divine Truth": "I will tell you how I think of people: I try to forget myself and everyone and to merge myself, for them, in Unity."

Again I cannot help but notice the analogy with psychoanalysis, which you might say is the study of the "lower vertical," whereas Eckhart's mystical theology is the study of the upper vertical: "[A] person must penetrate and transcend everything created and temporal and all being and go into the ground that has no ground.... If anyone wishes to come into God's ground and his innermost, he must first come into his own ground and his innermost, for no one can know God who does not first know himself."

As McGinn explains, "God unbecomes when the mystic is not content to return to the 'God' who acts, but effects a 'breaking through' to the silent unmoving Godhead, one that brings all creatures back into the hidden source through their union in the deconstructed 'intellect.'" Or, in the words of Eckhart, "When I enter the ground, the bottom, the flood and the source of the Godhead, no one asks me where I come from or where I have been. There no one misses me, and there God 'unbecomes.'"

I would never claim to know God. Nor can anyone know God, for this would imply human containment of what by definition transcends man. Rather, as Eckhart said, the knowing is in the trying, and the trying involves a continuous sort of unknowing, non-doodling, or rank coonfusion: "This not-knowing draws [the soul] into amazement and keeps her on the hunt, for she clearly recognizes 'that he is,' but she does not know 'what' or 'how' he is.... Therefore, the unknown-knowing keeps the soul constant and still on the hunt.... [T]his unknowing lures and draws you from all that is known, and also from yourself." McGinn calls it a "simultaneous eating and hungering after God."

Eckhart distinguishes between "mere ignorance and learned ignorance," or what Raccoons call the Higher Bewilderness: "One must here come to a transformed knowing, and this unknowing must not come from ignorance; rather from knowing one must come into an unknowing. Then, we will become knowing with divine knowing and then our unknowing will be ennobled and clothed with supernatural knowing. And here, in that we are in a state of receiving, we are more perfect than if we were active."

Perfect nonsense!

Eckhart said that we are held back or "estranged" from God by three primary conditions, time, multiplicity and matter. As a result, one again cannot "know" God per se. Rather, one can only undergo him. Or, in Raccoon terms, one must sopher God. Bion would have oppreciated this observation, for he recognized that if one cannot suffer pain, one cannot suffer pleasure, and knowledge is rooted in the pain of separation -- separation from O. Unknowing this separation is the highest form of knowledge, but it can only happen if you exert enough passivity or strive with all the effortlessness you can meister.

Me? I've obviously given up completely, as this post proves.

On Packing Light for the Eternal Journey

They say that the sales of a book will be diminished by the percentage of pages that contain any kind of mathmatical equation. People might pluck the book from the shelf, but as soon as they see any numbers, they put it back.

I'm afraid it's the same with my symbolic oquations, perhaps with the exception of O, since it can camouflage itself as a letter. But throw in stuff like (•), →, (¶), or •••(¶)•••, and people start to recoil. There, see. Wait! Come back!

But for me, these symbols were a kind of lifesaver -- or mind saver -- because they allowed me to see through to the unity beneath all of the various revelations I had immersed myself in at the time -- not just across revelations, but within them. Really, it's like musical notation. Imagine how musically limited we would be in the absence of an abstract system to describe it.

The other day I was reading about an album Sinatra made with the Duke Ellington band in the 1960s. Sinatra always worked with the very best studio guys, who both had jazz chops and could also sight read as easily as you're reading this post. But as great as they were, no one in the Ellington band could sight read. Ellington wrote hundreds of compositions, and the band learned each one by simply playing it. In a way, it makes each composition a unique entity that cannot be seen as anything more simple or abstract than itself.

This is largely the position mankind at large was in prior to the scientific revolution. No one knew, for example, that the same force that caused the apple to fall from the tree, also caused the earth to fall through the curved space around the sun -- or, in Newtonian terms, that there was an underlying g-force that accounted for such diverse phenomena.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered the similarities between certain yogic approaches and Orthodox Christianity. Faced with such a similarity, one has several options. One could say that one is a debased or partial form of the other; or that one is a premonition of the other; or like Schuon, that each is true in its own right and in its own human world; or that they are symbolic or mythological expressions of perennial truth.

In my case, I suppose you could say that I attempted to develop a "general theory of spirituality" that would apply to all particular spiritual experiences, so that modern people who otherwise cannot appreciate religion could begin to access its priceless wisdom. And I am particularly interested in reaching the many westerners who are attracted to Buddhism or yoga, because only a revitalization of Christianity will save the West -- and therefore the world. We need you on our side. There is nothing in eastern religions that cannot be found in Christianity, but much in Christianity that is responsible for our uniquely valuable civilization.

Please bear in mind that the experience always takes precedence, and that the symbols are merely a means of "storage and communication," so to speak. Instead of musical notation, it's spiritual notation. But in neither case does it exist for its own sake. Rather, the purpose of music is to be played, heard, and understood. And the purpose of spiritual experience is to discover your true self, and therefore, God (and/or vice versa).

Sherrard writes that "to know oneself may be said to be a condition of knowing God.... In other words, if one cannot know God without knowing oneself, one also cannot know oneself without knowing God. To be ignorant of oneself is thus to be ignorant of the divine source of one's being. If to be ignorant of oneself is to fail to achieve an authentic human life, then by the same token to be ignorant of God is to fail to achieve an authentic human life."

So, each is a prerequisite for the other, which is why I say that (¶) is a kind of "prolongation" of O, whereas (•) is a reflection of Ø. Thus, you can see that I simply abstract the essence of what a Sherrard is conveying. Then it's up to you to refill the abstraction with your own experience. The purpose of life is to reflect and embody eternity within time, or let us say O through (¶).

For a real life example of what happens when someone fails to know themselves -- and therefore God -- see Scipio's two recent posts on the eternally clueless Maureen Dowd.

On one of Scipio's pieces, I left a comment about having viewed the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries yesterday evening. If you haven't seen the film, it's about an elderly professor who is about to receive some kind of honor. During the course of the journey to where he is to receive the award, he reflects upon his life.

I haven't gotten to the end of the film yet, but one can sense that it is all about a kind of nightmarish realization that he died long ago, and that he is solely identified with (•). The painful realization that he has missed out on his own life comes to him in the form of disturbing dreams and images. At one point, his daughter in law says to him, You know so much. And yet you know nothing.

This is the fate of all (k). It really has no living relationship to O, but is merely a kind of cloak with which intellectuals cover themselves in order to produce a kind of self-generated warmth and security. But upon your death -- or birth, it's up to you -- this (k) dissolves like a dirt clod in the water. It just decomposes and returns to the earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

There is a living source and a living knowledge (n), and only this is free from the grip of Death. It is what you take with you when you grow. The rest of your intellectual baggage is eternally lost in the errport.

@ American Thinker, another dangerously false self, Obama.