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The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. St. Augustine, Confessions

You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the  advantage. John von Newuann, to Claude Shannon

Sweet is by convention, bitter by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void. Democritus

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. Stephen Toulmin

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Thoughts on reading Sean Carroll, particularly his “From Eternity to Here.” (2016)

December, 2022

In the interest of full disclosure I’ll put out front that I am decidedly not of the same mind as scientists when it comes to empiricism. I have my own ideas about the proper place of science and its methods and they do not comport with that which is commonly accepted in today’s world. I am skeptical about any claim of any kind as to the nature of the Real. To my way of thinking the predominate feature of the phenomenal Universe is silence. (According to the ancient Rabbis of Israel the likely reason for this is that God, having created man, found it necessary to “withdraw”, in order to make room for his creation.) That needs to be respected and it might be true that it follows that the reason for that silence, if opened, might reveal an alternative to empirical approaches, to so called scientific proofs, that one might find overwhelmingly obvious. In short our methods, while disclaiming anthropocentrism, are yet just that…in so many words. Scientists, and their progenitors, are, some more obviously than others, difficult if not impossible to pry apart from their theories. That is what a real search for Truth, for Beauty even, entails at its very heart. This requires surrender not clinging to dogma, orthodoxy.

Obviously I will not be able to do justice to Carroll’s work. Lack the capacity. Furthermore, and quite bluntly, science, I’m led to conclude – not from reading Carroll’s book, or any scientific work, but through philosophical studies – is nothing but religion dressed up in esoteric formulas, theories, equations. So, if you are bound to faith in science, you won’t like what follows. My interest is in unbinding and is characterized by an individual cupping his hands to receive that which is given, not in grasping at that which merely moves beyond. There are many ways of being in the world, beginning with the primitive and moving through phases – science is one – and culminating, perhaps, in the one true path. I don’t know the way and claim its not truly knowable anyway. Understanding, however, is a bit different.

Science generalizes from small samples to the whole universe. For instance, Einstein’s field equation(s) of General Relativity which purport to tell us that spacetime is a single “thing” and that it “controls” how bodies, energy, all the stuff in it, behaves, moves, and evolves while the same things determine the features of spacetime.

R_μν − ½Rg_μν = 8πGT_μν

For what its worth this is exactly how Carroll renders Einstein’s field equation of general relativity. Searches for this on-line find the same except the value following the equal sign is shown divided by 4 to the 4th power. I don’t know why and besides its beyond the scope of this report to get into the depths of this. Honestly, I don’t have the expertise necessary to give a complete exegesis of the equation but will note its not really “one” equation it is a series of 16, of which this particular rendition is, I suppose, just enough to get started, a summary, if you like. These are differential equations measurimg rates of change and in one case, I understand, the rate of change of the rate of change.

Having said that I would make this further contribution for a little clarity:

“Einstein assumed that the universe was static and unchanging. He thought this was true because that was what astronomers at the time thought they saw when they looked out into their telescopes. A static universe would be unstable if gravity was only attractive. Every piece of matter would attract to every other and any slight imbalance in distribution would force the whole thing to eventually contract down into itself. Einstein added the cosmological constant to his equations (technically, he subtracted it from the scalar curvature) to hold back gravity so that his equations would have a solution that agreed with the static model.”

What this means is not having obtained the results he wanted Albert Einstein rewrote the formula such that it’s solution was more to his liking, prejudice. There was an orthodoxy, a scientific dogma he sought to accommodate. Science’s immediate predecessor, religion, would burn offenders of the church’s dogma at the stake. Science has moved beyond such extreme measures. Now there are more subtle punishments, ruined careers, and such. Carroll cites some of these in passing. Also noted are those scientists in the Elmer Gantry mold who delight in making headline getting claims about their discoveries, theories. Niehls Bohr comes to mind.  These don’t hesitate a nano second to speculate but, to illustrate their dogma, a carry over from religion, they never consider that which they axiomatically reject, namely an agency, a creator, sustainer, destroyer; a qualitative immanence.

That said I’d note this formula occupies the middle ground between Newtonian physics and Quantum leaving aside the very long time we wasted, so to speak, in geocentrism  before it gave way to the heliocentric model. This kind of science is very speculative – I wish I had counted how many times Carroll fell back to “we don’t know” statements or the like. Scientific theory is very much an unfinished work when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I’m concerned here, of course, with cosmology.

These various views are basically all mechanistic and none of them venture to risk saying what matter is, just how it behaves, that it works something like a machine; quantum theory being somewhat willing to leave that behind, focuses on waves or fields, but it still is called quantum “mechanics”. But a wave or field is an ephemeral thing compared to solid bodies moving around in orbits. One can identify where such waves, fields might be found but only with limited precision. The thing about planets, and such, is that their place, path, can be identified with great precision, you know, good enough that we can fly a spaceship to the moon and land and return to earth.

Quantum mechanics is a step towards replacing Newtonian, classical physics which treats objects, masses, as definite in space time while quantum mechanics recognizes them as not so certain in their existence as to where they can be definitely said to be, especially at the micro level where they are wave functions rather than objects in the classical sense. So, yes, one can say with certain probability that a gross object can be found at so-and-so place but not so much with something like an electron which location is much less probable. We speak of electron clouds surrounding nuclei as a way of expressing this. Electrons can be said to be somewhere in that cloud. Think, how can one state precisely where a ripple on a pond is? It’s there but its location is more ephemeral than say a tree along the street; though strictly they are both “waves” on the surface of reality. But this oscillation through spacetime for things on the atomic scale means location is not definite but still can be said to be with a certain probability here or there.

As we journey through the successive phases of our knowledge of science we realize these equations can’t measure the Universe itself and are used instead to measure a small sample. Knowing how spacetime behaves in this sample along with that which is embedded therein, the bodies, their mass, energy, radiation, etc., we apply that to the Universe itself in the pattern “knowing this I know that.”

Supposedly there are about a trillion stars in the Universe. (We count the number in a somewhat smaller area and apply that data to the whole, for instance.) The Universe is thought to be expanding at an increasing rate of speed. The “red shift” of very distant objects (supernova Ia stars) – these are exploding stars and are very bright so can be more readily observed at cosmological distances – is increasingly larger for these novae. That’s how we know of the expansion. Note there’s not enough explosive power from the “big bang” to account for this apparent acceleration. Gravity should slow the expansion down; so a mysterious force, “dark energy” is posited to account for the expansion of the Universe where one would think it would be impeded by gravitational attraction of all the mass. Dark energy, though thought to be rather weak – and which we haven’t isolated, proved –  provides just enough extra push to the explosive force from the big bang to account for the observed acceleration.

Dark energy. So, a mysterious force or agency, is assumed to account for an unknown, perhaps unknowable circumstance. True, its not “outside” the known universe as they tend to think a “divine creative force” would be, or is thought to be by their assumed religious antagonists. One wonders if they appreciate this irony.  Dark energy is treated as a little understood constant that is used to account for an invisible magical force. They can make the numbers work so its plugged into their assumptions, theories. In religion, god is used as a constant in a similar sense, to account for the unknown, perhaps unknowable.

The big bang model assumes the universe began in an exquisitely ordered condition of the lowest entropy, hot and dense. Carroll calls this a singularity, infinitely dense, zero size – size would have no meaning, but he says zero timespace came into existence at that event. Of course time has a direction much different than spatial directions. Carroll points out that any direction in space is about the same. The direction of time is always away from the past for which there are many illustrations. He writes that while the earth orients us in space, the big bang orients us in time. (Pg. 32) You’ll never walk down a beach and have a sand castle materialize out of the chaotic surroundings; you’ll never separate an omelet back into an egg, or coffee with cream back into its individual constituents. This is what it means when entropy is said to increase, when the arrow ot time is always toward the future – at least that is the simplistic view. Entropy is a measure of the disordliness of things in a closed system and can be said to explain why we remember the past and not the future. And, of course, its based on the second law of thermodynamics. Carroll says this is science’s most important law. It states that the entropy of an isolated system either remains constant or increases with time.

Ludwig Boltzmann’s formula for entropy is S = K log W and he defined it as “a measure of the number of particular microscopic arrangements of atoms that appear indistinguishable from a macroscopic perspective.”  Further, “in an isolated system entropy tends to increase, because there are more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy.”

Before the big bang there is no frame of reference. In fact it makes no sense to say “before”. “At” the (infinitely?) exquisitely low entropy of the primordial egg, singularity, or whatnot, to spacetime emergence with the big bang – only then does “before” or “after” or “at” have a context in which to make sense. Only then is there a “then”. Otherwise its from the standpoint of nowhen/nowhere. Its claimed the primordial egg whence the big bang is the lowest possible entropy, the highest possible order.

So, as John Archibald Wheeler noted, “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” Clever physicist, John Wheeler.

So the Universe goes from beginnings of very high order, like an egg, and proceeds to increasing disorder; and that disorder as it progresses is said to gain momentum. Interesting. Sort of like the birth of anything at all, isn’t it? First the egg, then the incubation, then the birth, then the dissolution. “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dieing.” the poet says. (Dylan) So, they invoke a chicken to illustrate the process but Carroll and cohorts are careful to be somewhat dismissive of any idea or principle construed as anthropic which I question because, after all, people – and chickens (fowlthropic?) – are made of atoms and such just like the rest of the observable universe.

Entropy increases eternally and it all ends with nothing but dead stars, galaxies, in a uniform distribution of high entropy, heat death for all that is. This seems to ignore the observation that everything that is is cyclical, a single exception being made for the whole thing taken as one. The final end is meaningless, purposeless, cold, lonely, Carroll writes. We might as well never have been.

Parity. Is the low entropy of the boundary condition of the big bang in parity with the high entropy of a dead universe? Were there a “big crunch” instead would that also be parity? This question comes to mind, but the answer is unknown.

Layers of complexity keep getting piled on while assuming averages of these states are adequate to their extrapolation to the whole. So they add complexities then simplify them to make them easy to work with, plug into their equations. After awhile the bewilderment grows into necessitating a kind of omniscience on the part of reaching an understanding. They claim this power at the same time admitting unknowns; they claim god like status where the deity is a statistician finagling the way through a mechanistic milieu. Mass and energy and all the various components are treated as things, manipulated like a game of marbles. Its called “physics” for a reason

One other thing to note early on would be science’s attitude towards consciousness. Carroll thinks it is emergent. Carroll is especially hostile to the idea of a God outside the Universe and purports to be an atheist. This writer agrees with Carroll that its a primitive and unhelpful idea that “he” is outside; this notion dates back to Aristotle and before. This writer subscribes to the notion that Christianity errs in following the Aristotelian ideas surrounding the corruption of the world below compared to the perfection of the incorruptible regions above – heaven. I’d rather think of the divine creative force as immanent in nature. Carroll seems to give some credence to this notion.

Carroll brings Buddhist cosmology, if their is such a thing, to the table. He doesn’t attribute this to Buddhism but it sounds like what I understand the Buddha said – I don’t know which Buddha, however. Any how he (Buddha) made the claim that our experience of the world is separated into exquisitely brief slices of time; the world arises anew in each and they are not really connected in the way one would commonly think; this Buddha is said to have made the claim that nothing endures. Carroll puts that:

“So the world exists, and what is more, the world happens, again and again. In that sense, the world is like the different frames of a film reel – a film whose camera view includes the entire universe. (There are also, as far as we can tell, an infinite number of frames, infinitesimally separated.”

Carroll continues, substituting a view not from nowhere but from nowhen:  “…when looking down from nowhen …we don’t see anything changing with time, because we are outside of time ourselves. Instead, we see all history at once – past, present, and future. It’s like thinking of space and time as a book, which we could in principle open to any passage, [and view any page at random] rather than as a movie, where we are forced to watch events in sequence…”

What science aims at is a theory of everything. Thing. Is key here; materialistic. Now science does not purport to tell what matter is, just how it behaves. Carroll seems, in his epilogue, to make a concession, however small, to the notion that something is missing in the methods of science when he mentions natural theology. Further, he has left Caltech and now is on the faculty of John’s Hopkins university in Maryland as a professor of  “Natural Philosophy, hearkening back to the days before science and philosophy split into distinct disciplines… I’ve always been interdisciplinary, between physics and philosophy and other things, and also always had an interest in reaching out to wider audiences. But there was inevitably tension with what I was supposed to be doing as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. My predilections don’t fit comfortably with the academic insistence on putting everyone into a silo and encouraging them to stay there.” From his blog post, here. (His web site is here.) So, he left Caltech because, partially because, I guess, he wanted freedom to explore more widely the mindscape beyond physics and cosmology. I think he is a good man and appreciate this insight into his thinking. But I also appreciate that its tantalizing, and you get drawn in, attracted to the notion, as a scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, you might be the special one that actually puts forth a theory of everything that conflates Newtonian (classical) physics, special and general relativity of Einstein, and quantum physics and string theory and explain the arrow of time as it relates to the big bang, the death of Universe, in short, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. One who pays scant attention to all this might be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of such a discovery. Reading “From Eternity to Here” leaves one with the opposite notion – we’ve hardly begun this exciting discovery of a theory that explains all that is. We are also led to understand that the community of scientists have unshakeable faith in their enterprise and will some day achieve their aims.

But. What if the universe, what if being, existence, reality does not care or even take note of your prognostications? What does that leave you with? It leaves you with nothing. Which might be a something nothing but also might teach one that the discovery itself is the meaning and purpose that seems to elude us.

I certainly don’t know and live with the realization that I actually can’t know. One question that seems to point to a contradiction in the science is how can it be said that the earliest universe was characterized by extremely low entropy. (S _{inflation ≈ 10¹²} ) is the formula Carroll gives for the entropy at the inception of the big bang, the birth of the universe. But if the big bang did not happen at a place nor a time – these have no meaning, space and time being products of the big bang – how can it be said what entropy was when there was no spacetime? I don’t think there can be entropy without spacetime. Take any condition you like, it depends on there being a place and a time, a framework.

Why multiverse and not universe? Carroll writes a lot about these; and others, too. Personal, speculative. “Creator” was not sure of outcome, so plant many seeds, allow several potentialities to eventuate in order to pick the best of the several. Or, is it like Darwin’s natural selection at work? Also, Carroll is careful to say many scientists don’t like this theory of a multiverse – he calls it, rather, a prediction, because its not falsifiable – it makes no predictions than can be proven/disproven. He also says the formulae can be tested and that science is a messy business.

The conundrums never cease. Carroll writes about opposing theories, for instance, quantum gravity could allow that “time never begins but stretches for all eternity”.  This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which has time dependent on entropy increasing. Personally, again. I’d speculate, posit, that time is not quantitative but qualitative so its meaningless to say it begins, ends, is eternal. Perhaps Time can be better understood as being like, for instance, beauty, or truth, or liberty and other emergent phenomena. Maybe, going back to Democritus, time is by convention. At any rate we’re not there yet though cosmologists seem to think a full theory of quantum gravity would be the Rosetta stone to this end. Final thought. If time is eternal why should we be surprised that a final theory of everything, a grand unifying theory, is attainable at all? Meaning, the discovery, the search is itself eternal.

In Carroll’s epilogue to the book he gets philosophical. This makes a beautiful contrast to all that went before. Nature is universal; what happens here happens everywhere. “The entire universe is in a glass of wine.” He quotes Richard Feynman. And, finally “True understanding leads you to places you didn’t know you wanted to go.” That is the heritage of the great men of science, Tycho Brae, Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, and my favorite, Eratosthenes of Cyrene who having taken note of the sun’s light shining straight down a well on the summer solstice coupled with the angle of the sun’s shadow in nearby Alexandria used that difference in angle to derive the Earth’s circumference. I’m awestruck by that and Carroll’s work, too. Reverence is in order.

G.V. Desani (and here) was my mentor. I’d like to bring his studies to bear here as a contrast in my thoughts on Sean Carroll’s work, indeed, on Science itself, as, one may term it, a mode of being.  In particular I have in mind his experience with so called “Nadi” writers, ancient “seers” – that would be an Indian, more particularly, a Hindu phenomenon. Desani wrote about this in an essay, here; there are other writings of his that impinge on the Nadi Texts, but I’ll concentrate on the one cited. First citation in that piece, on page 17* he defines science:

“One uses the word “science” mostly for that body of
knowledge which is gathered empirically from nature and by
observing man: and for that body of knowledge which is
found to be of service to man. According to this definition,the knowledge acquired through revelation (religious knowledge, for example) or intuitively divined knowledge (anything at all, including the mystical) would not be termed “science”. There is an obvious conflict between the view of “reality” afforded by each of these sources of knowledge.

“If the above definition of “science” is accepted, then, for
all practical purposes, the Law of Causality (the relation of cause –“antecedent” — and effect — “consequent”) must be accepted as scientifically valid. A thing, an event, is caused. A tree is from a seed: water boils from heat. For all practical purposes, all perceived consequences or effects are from antecedents or causes. That is — in the sense in which we use the word science — an accepted law of science.”

In this article Desani confronts events he has experienced that contradict the Law of Causality. According to Desani the writers of the Nadi texts are humans who have overheard, had dictated to them, non-human, great beings; I suppose it would be correct to call them divine entities. They have perfect knowledge of all past and future and it has been demonstrated to Desani’s satisfaction as outlined in his linked piece by that name. I’m not inclined to lay out his thoughts on the subject at this juncture but its clear that they couldn’t run more counter to science and its methods, theories, equations. So, there is another world view antithetical to anything most of us have ever been exposed to. It deserves consideration and, in my opinion, is no more fantastic, unlikely, than the scientific claim that experience depends on affirmation by a conscious being for its being, or that observing photons actually determines how they behave, and mabye cats, too.

So, I’ll leave it at that with this final thought. The immanence of a divine creative spirit, force, is as a quality, faculty, attribute, rather than a “person”. Is consciousness a similar phenomenon, and if so can it be said that it is an emergent phenomenon, or is it immanent, too? Is it a “built in” quality that necessarily emerges? Is it always true that said emergence occurs along with the various concomitants of consciousness? Does Truth (a concomitant of consciousness) play a role in the Real? Perhaps it’s a mere random fluctation. How would one know? Wrong question! It is what it is. You wouldn’t know, you couldn’t. Forbidden knowledge. The Real is no more accessible than the speed of light. You – one – can imagine -dream? – but it is ever just beyond one’s grasp. So. Only mystery remains, only unsolved, unsolvable, puzzles. And you thought this would be easy. That is, just relax and it will come to you. Well! Not so fast, there. It’s intended to be obscure, impossible, unsearchable. “G_d” withdrew to make room for man. Screaming conclusion: That withdrawal makes of man, sentient life anywhere/anywhen, co-creator. Put slightly differently, “G_d” descends into matter in order to (re-)emerge a fully self realized being. There’s a bit of natural philosophy for you.

*The name of the .pdf is NADI_SHASTRI_3_GVD.PDF. A search of the site does not find it but its there, as of this writing, under the heading “Articles, Lectures, & Academic Papers” at: “The Nādi Shāstra,“ based on the first six columns of ” ‘Very High’ and ‘Very Low’ “, The Illustrated Weekly of India and likely developed for inclusion in Desani’s planned Rissala. This is a compilation of several of Desani’s pieces about this subject.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot (exerpt)

This is akin to the idea that one can, as has been noted by a forbearer, “gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind.”

I’ve been thinking about knowledge, understanding, and how man uses these to make his way through life. One can know something without understanding it yet many conflate knowledge and understanding. Science takes measure of the material world and then concludes the measurement is understanding, for instance. Knowledge and understanding are subtly different. As for particular realities understanding and knowledge do conflate rather nicely. But there are boundaries to this conflation. If you want to know all the information in the universe you find that you can know an awful lot but the nearer you get to your grand unifying theory the greater the task of reaching that conclusion. It is at this event horizon, the boundary of particular knowledge, that mere “understanding” cannot reach beyond. Without the suspension of what has become an encumbrance, knowledge of phenomena, the transition of the particular into the universal is arrested and though the thought processes that went into the edifice of knowledge were exquisitely constructed that final leap to full comprehension escapes the precision of the exercise.

There are several other ideas that impinge on this consideration. Consciousness itself and its relationship to mind and in turn to understanding and knowledge. No doubt these all work in a simbiotic stream of dialectic. Knowledge must be first because it is the mouth of the dialectic, so to speak, that consumes the output of the senses which in turn consume the input of their collision with the phenomenal reality in which people find themselves. In this processing of data, of taking measure, the mind partners with knowledge and is the faculty that connects this with that to conclude the other. I see such and such, then so and so, and conclude something other. If A happens, then B, I have learned that if A then B. Understanding is the faculty of mind that makes the leap beyond a mere set of particular knowledge to arrive at something new in a synthesis of the precursors.

Mind is the field on which as a result of perception knowledge comes and goes and it is mind that gives rise to understanding of the relationships among things, the implications. That is understanding with a small “u” because it is restricted to phenomena.

Consciousness is a much more subtle constituent. It cannot be defined, and indeed, science largely ignores its presence and treats it as a mere given. It is easy to use a throw away idea that it is merely analogous to light. It does illuminate the activities of the mind, perception, knowledge, understanding. But this begs so many questions. Is it a function of life? Is my consciousness the same as yours? That is to say, we might all sit and watch a sunset. The light of the sun is something that we all participate in to share the experience. Is consciousness also something we all participate in and is it as omnipresent as light itself in the universe? Would animals, plants, so called inert matter, not to speak of planetary systems, suns, and galaxies participate in some fashion in the same consciousness which a human being makes use of to contemplate the stars?

There is a word, numinous, Latin for surpassing comprehension, or understanding. It points to the realm of the mysterious, for instance in art, there always remains an element that escapes the precision to define what it is exactly that is the beauty of a particular work. That final breach of knowledge in the universal set of all things leaves one in bewilderment, in awe; understanding with a small “u” must be abandoned, given up on, at which juncture a new, in fact an ever new, field comes into view, not in the phenomenal sense, but in a spiritual sense. Then Understanding with a capital “U” is brought forth to invade the profane with a sacred glimpse of the divine.

Plato thought that beauty, for instance, was a window through which one could have a glimpse of the transcendent. His thought that one could see right through beauty to the Real itself thoroughly encapsulates his thought. Thus, Beauty acts as an attractant – the sweetness of a rose, its color, texture, even its evanescence – are inviting portals indeed to the unlimited vastness that lies “just beyond”. The phenomenon is not so much real in itself as giving its existence as a means of transport to that being from which it emerged.

I’m going this way
this way, this way
without a trace
no track more
than a hawk leaves.

The fall, fall, fall
who remembers, take note?
Not you, not them or those or these
Barely me, barely me!
Just a little….I guess.

It matteers
not, not, not
never mind, even.
Who cares?
To notice, benefit from,
this passing air, ephemeral contrail.

Vapor, vaporization,
a sparrow falls in the forest
old, decrepit, moldy mottled feathers
lieing in the grass
decaying death.

Must a sun heed its
its planets becoming cinders?
A sun expends its ending life
devouring in seas
of burning burning
seas of gold,
seas of gold,
burning seas of golden seas.
planets, life, cares,
long forgotten traces of
memories, memories,
forgotten memories.

Oh! Lost to eternity!
Shape of Reality
sweet words, kisses.

Did I perhaps pass this way?
Its not for me to say.
Do you recall
what I whispered?
Secretely, just for you,
you alone, alone, alone.

Words, Oh Yes!
Those words. You know the ones.
Told eternally,
not remembered
but discovered anew
anew, anew, anew, anon
just for you
dearest one.

Where was I bound,
coming from?
They are the same
aren’t they, aren’t they?
They are.
Destination is its own
self made origin,
beginning, beginning, fulfilled
ending, dieing, despair.

Despair, despair, despair
dark dank death
birth astride graves
ending as it begins
before it begins
its over, over, gone.

But what do I know?
This fathomless depth?
Yeah! Sure! Fool yourself,
yes you. Yourself, yourself.
Infinite, finely machined
regress of self
self, self, abyss, abyss, ex nihilio.

I don’t know.
Never heard of it even
I’m lost in these words
can’t climb out of their
meaning, meaning, unreal purpose.

Purpose? Don’t kid me!
I’m co-creator here
dread, dread, sorrow!
What purpose is mine alone to give
when I find it?
Find, discover, realize
suffering, suffering, alone in
golden seas of pain.

Desani: If there was only one religion you would only have a partial view [of being/reality]

Co-creator – Rabbinic Judaism

Means by which world has self experience, knows itself – Distillation of Hinduism by G.V. Desani

Sinner who must be saved – Christianity

There is truth in all of the above. The idea that we are partners with the divine as co-creators merges with the idea that we are the means by which the world has self experience; God descends into matter in order to re-emerge a self realized being. That is the story of Jesus. In a sense Jesus is everyman, then. But pride inhibits this unfolding and is the sin from which we must evolve in order to be who we really are. Saved from our sin is to give up our will, humble ourselves before the divine creative spirit. It is expressed as “Take up your cross and follow me.” Give up your will to mine, is what that means. Then our life is no longer ours but “his”, our father’s. God, the creator then lives through us. If the will, our little will, is triumphant, then the self, our little self, won’t humble itself and we will continue as slaves to our passions, or worse, if one believes in demon possession. The path most, in the Western world, are on leads to self-loathing as we struggle in vain to shed this guilt which has been inculcated into us for two thousand years. Instead of understanding it for what it is, a key to redemption, we sublimate it only to have it continuously crop up in every aspect of our lives.

Be like the bamboo leaf on which snow accumulates until the leaf gives way and the snow slips off. It follows its own nature without effort, without willing. There is no will involved whatsoever. The leaf surrenders to the weight of the snow flakes flawlessly; the Beauty of this is ineffable.

Surrender to God is in the Hindu’s Gita. So is love of God (Bhakta) and ritualized worship. Self denial, asceticism, is there too. Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity seem to have appealed in ancient times to a common undercurrent. What they commonly teach distills down to what, in Yoga, is called “inhibition of the citta vritis”. Suppression of the modifications of the mind. That would, of course be Patanjali’s first sutra on the nature and meaning of Yoga in his Yoga Sutras. Inhibition of modifications of the mind, or consciousness, could be viewed as surrender to God and is intended to accelerate the realization that we finite beings point to the infinite, are made in the image of all that is; we are sparks of the divine, it is taught. As David Goldman puts it in his Beethoven essay, the infinite is ever present and appearances always point to it as that is where the infinite, so to speak, hides. So, God is omnireal, omnipresent and there is no finite absent the infinite. This is similar to there being no light absent darkness, no good absent evil, no positive absent the negative. There are contrasting pairs, aspects, of reality everywhere.

Failing to realize these points is a spin off of our diabolical endeavor to build a machine to replace God; call it the “web”, the “interNET”. It is, at least, intended to be all providing (Amazon), Omniscient (Wikipedia, e.g.), and Omnipresent (Google, et al), Omnipotent (the State). It is infinitely malleable; we make it whatever we want and call it good but I think it likely is the opposite. We’ve made a Faustian bargain? And this machine god is ruthless, takes a terrible toll among the impressionable young. Should we encourage the measurement of the value of one’s life on facebook likes, on re-tweets, up and down votes?

Sixty years ago I lived, as a young soldier, in Gablingen Kaserne. It was an old barracks used formerly, during WWII, by the German Wehrmacht. I was a soldier, an Infantryman. Looking back on that, taking its measure from long perspective, I now realize that likely those couple of years were the best of my life. That young soldier would think me crazy for saying this now. He was so full of himself, of longing, of ambition, restlessness, eagerness. He never, or hardly ever, saw himself for what he was. Yes, he’d been brought up right, had good parenting, learned the religious things they taught then, which he mostly rejected being so self absorbed. He didn’t know it but he was like a bird fluttering over the abyss.  Now I’m still that bird but the abyss has grown to infinite proportions. If someone had told him the way to understand, simply put, what I have written here and elsewhere is to realize that man confers on God individuality and in return God confers on man universality. That is a simple truth and is, I believe, the true story of Jesus. Put a bit differently, the story of Jesus is intended to teach that man, at least potentially, displays the attributes of God. As co-creator he even has the power to replace God with a machine and worship that. Realizing this is near impossible, because, of course, we are mired in our “sin” which, that young man would never understand, means simply that we cling to our will at all cost. Given this being we manage continuously to corrupt it in ever new and shiny ways. The web tangles us the more in that net.

History is pressing us forward. We are on a journey through unfolding cultural epochs. The transition from one to the next is anything but seamless. The features fractalize, get corrupted, intentions take on a life of their own in spite of whether they were good or bad. They morph, combine, bubble up out of the mire and forever sprout evolving manifestations of themselves. First we lived as artists, artisans, primitavely assemblying our world mainly into questions about who we were, what this was that we found ourselves in. Art asks questions but expects no answers but soon our questions led to primitive answers about purpose and meaning and we merged into the succeding epoch, religion which had the answers putting them above man in a separate realm called heaven with God as custodian. Reality was perfect above, beyond man, and corrupt below. It was an Aristotleian view of the world. That morphed into science – we were only three steps removed from our beginning where the impossible to access answers as to meaning and purpose continues to be beyond us in the sense it perpetually awaits explication in a “grand unifying theory”. One theory creates ever successive opportunities for new and better explanations of how things fit together in an assumed mechanistic universe. Science enhances our material nature and we become ever more enslaved by it thereby but history as cultural epoch comes to us now and further emphasizes the material aspect of being. We theorize that history shows the way logically by steps through a heuristic and dialectic process, a recursive and infinite regress for the betterment of mankind’s lot. As in Religion and Science, in History we similarly have a final synthesis to be reached on a perpetually vanishing horizon that we somehow can never quite reach. This is where we are now. In these epochs consciousness is directed out from us into the world. The West having learned through Christianity to “spread the good word” continues that missionary zeal with endless meddling in other people’s affairs “for their own good” – in short, the historical effort to colonize continues with zeal the evangelists of old would admire. Some even say we are now colonizing ourself. Now, if only we could connect everyone somehow with a live system that is always on we would have achieved history’s wildest dream as everyone merges into The Hive with the necessary loss, of course, of any individuality. In The Hive Sobran says that like an Hive bound insect one loses the need for a soul of one’s own. That’s the cost of being in the collective. In the ancient Vedas it is written that “Knowing your own self (soul) you know the soul of the Universe.” Its of paramount importance to guard your individuality though we are almost to the point of totaly losing ours. Only a few luddites, old people, stand in the way and of course we know how to deal with those. War, famine, divisiveness, not to speak of custom made pandemics and fear, are useful tools in this. There are too many people anyhow.

To recap, the crowning achievement of these cultural epochs was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolutin is evolving into total interconnectivity, interdependence of all mankind when this material machine completely replaces God. Our primitive man would rebel against this intuitively. Modern man can’t be bothered with intuition. Intuition is the enemy of progressivism. But Religion, Science, and History could care less. Reason  finally has its triumph as it gloats over its great achievement of destroying man. Thing about a dystopia is everyone is on the same page, everything finally makes sense and is in logical order whatevere it costs. But, there will be another epoch sprouting out of this, to be sure.

Eratosthenes (276-194BC) in Syene Egypt, now Aswan, discovered the circumference of Earth. It was measured in Stadia, based on the size of the then current Greek unit of length. From that was calculated the diameter of the Earth, about 8,000 miles. Now, in astronomical terms that is indeed a tiny thing. We live on a planet that is likely almost impossible to detect outside the solar system. The earth/sun orbits its center of mass which is deep inside the sun. We are barely here, unknown, alone in the abyss of space. What are we doing to earn our keep? Oh, we are kept, make no doubt about it. By what/whom is unknowable to us but we are, it seems, somewhat sentient life forms. Some believe the Earth, too, is sensate. If there is a purpose and meaning we might come to have at least a rudimentary understanding of it. The first step should be to humbly accept what we truly are and that is decidedly not the author of our own inheritance of this tiny dirt ball we call planet Earth. Think about this. Until we came along as sentient life forms there was no beauty, truth, love, understanding, wisdom, or any concomitant of consciousness whatsoever. Most of all, that late comer Humility hadn’t appeared. Our emergence as living beings capable of self understanding was a precursor event for the emergence of these values or faculties. What is unfolding here? What further emergence will these precipitate? Could it be the divine itself? Or, have we perhaps reached our credit limit?

Consiousness is heretofore directed outwards. What would be the consequence of somehow managing to have it – realize it -as returning on itself?

I’m grateful for Paul Kingsnorth whose writings I’ve lately been studying for inspiring me to write this entry.

self manifesting first principle

fundamental idea with the power to self manifest

potentiality with the power to actualize

The present is a realization or actualization of the past and future which are potentialities.

 

Music lives in the moment but its yearning is for the next moment. It is the essence of restlessness, of finding completion in the infinite regress of the horizon beyond the now.

 

If knowledge is always knowledge of something, then only reason leads to knowledge. All knowledge is through sense perception and memory. Direct knowledge, intuition, noesis, is not based on experience.

 

The oak dreams of the acorn. The acorn dreams of the oak. The stump lives in them both.

 

There is nothing that can be said that can do more for understanding the full meaning and purpose of life (enlightenment) than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for ‘seeing’ the moon.

 

Matter conveys individuality, form universality.

 

Guilt is the father of anger, hatred, self loathing. Salvation is the undoing of guilt through forgiveness, redemption. Guilt is self loathing. Achieve blamelessness through self sacrifice…accept the self as sacred.

Desani, March 14, 1973
Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

Margin note here that I got Texas tags today; quit moving houses. March 21, 1973. This means I retagged the 72 Chevy yellow van that I bought in Virginia and that I no longer worked with Jerry Sires. This leaves some confusion in my mind because I thought we finished moving houses prior to my purchase in VA. of the van. Maybe it means I quit “leveling” houses with Jerry.

Now the notes.

Heavy Karma is in the mind. There is a diagram here, a circle with a small area at the top delineated as “fixed destiny” while the larger area is labeled “unseen karma”. This unseen karma it is noted, consists of inumerable past deeds, words, lives.

The desiring of an object is animalistic.

Clinging to an object is equivalent to fear of losing same.

Fear is equivalent to guilt. Or rather, their natures are intimately entwined. (This is not attributable to Desani. It is mine.)

If one tends to animalism one eventually falls into violent experiences, employment, etc. For instance, the proliferation of armaments.

A sanskara is an unaccountable karmasaya.

Important: To have a spiritual mentor is a fixed destiny.

Attachment (is related to) revulsion.

A selfless action is a virtuous action.
Duty, not? intention, with love, with compassion.

Desani spent five years learning to walk without intention. It is exceedingly difficult, he said.

Restraints must be imposed on things that are easily overindulged in, for instance, sex.

My aside: Desani is a composer, a maestro, a conductor. He draws ideas, words, etc., into a mosaic.

When sattva rises to its highest level illumination is produced (in a situation).

There is a need to rise above the sweet and the bitter experience; there is a reward.

Told story about being in Burma, about yogis, hills, snakes, very large mosquitoes, AHIMSA (non violence). Desani reformed – first “clean” room – for a smooth pursuit of practice.

“The Science of Yoga”
I.K. Taimini

Sutra is an aphorism. (Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are aphorisms.)

First sutra: Yoga is control of the vriti, modifications, of citta, consciousness.

Patanjali was the compiler of yoga, an ancient tradition. (Later note: He was a retainer of a King I expect somewhat like the European Kings retained astronomers, mathematicians, etc.)

The Gita notes there are many yogas. The sage Patanjali’s yoga is a precursor of these:

Raja yoga
Dhyana/Zen yoga
Karma yoga – yoga of action (without desire)
Bhakti yoga – yoga of devotion – like a practiciing Christian’s love for his God. This would be Krsna.
Hatha yoga – physical yoga
Kundalina yoga

Samkhya is the theoretical basis of yoga.

The yogi seeks quiesence in order to attain samadhi or satori.

The philosophy derived from the yoga sutras is outlined thus:

Here a chart is drawn showing two realities. On the left is Purusha or spirit and on the right is Prakriti or existential mass, the substance of the universe, nature. Prakriti consists, with reservations, of three elements known as the gunas. They are Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas. (see below)

A line extends downward through Mahat, cosmic intelligence and then to Ahamkara, the principle of individuality, of “I am”.

A margin note here explains that the first product of the union of Purusha and Prakriti is Mahat.

Below Ahamkara comes Manas, the cosmic mind. Below Manas the chart branches into, on the left, Indriyas, the power of the senses, hearing, smelling, seeing, etc., and on the right the Tanmatras or subtle elements of sound, odor, visibility, etc.

Another margin note explains that it is from the Mahat that Patanjali intellectualized his compilaton. It is also the Mahat that westerners allude to when they speak of universal mind.

That is the chart.

Consciousness is made of, consists of (the) three gunas. A rose is made of the gunas. The “image” of a rose in one’s mind is made of the gunas. The difference is, with some reservations, a matter of quantity.

Sattva is the most subtle substance in nature. It is mental substance. On the moral level it is goodness. On the aesthetic level it is the most beautiful.

Rajas is the animating element.

Tamas is the passive element, the tendency to procrastinate is tied in with Tamas. It is also the steadying element. It pulls toward sleep.

Yoga has to do with the second guna, with stopping the animating element so that Sattva can shine forth. This is the quieting of consciousness.

Samadhi grants mokti, freedom. There are different levels of Samadhi. (page 41 of book)

Incomplete note on Samprajnatta (sp.) Samadhi.

There are five kinds of citta vritis.
1. A person feels full of lethargy, sleepy. Sattva and rajas are conquered by tamas. (The god’s never sleep and Desani, as monk, went ten or so days with no sleep. In this condition sattva reigns.)
2. Full of anger, tamas dominates.
3. Full of restlessness, rajas dominates.
4. Full of good works, Sattva dominates.
5. The highest Samadhi is the one that grants knowledge.

We have Purusha, or spirit on the one hand and Prakriti, cosmic substance on the other.

Yoga means union or yoke. The first result of the union or yoking of spirit and cosmic substance is cosmic intelligence.

On foreknowledge, a side note on the Nadi shastras, he said that two centuries ago on palm leaf [was written references] to Desani by name. It gives date of birth, place, and so forth. More on this here.

Qualities of Purusha: It is the Lord. It is not material. It is conscious.

Qualities of Prakriti: Sattva, mental substance, Raja, activating element, Tamas, inertia.

A 2500 year old commentary says that space and time are schemes for the understanding.

In Mahat Sattva dominates. Mahat is the source of wisdom. Mahat is the first evolute. Literally mahat means the great.

When Purusha and Prakriti are joined and the first evolute arises it is Purusha who sees this. It is Purusha that sees all.

Ahamkara is the precondition for the mind’s ability to discriminate. At Mahat there is no discrimination but just an ocean of light. (A thought that most people evolve to Ahamkara and stop, especially westerners.)

Yoga is the stilling of cita vritties, of modifications of consciousness.

(Yoga nirodha citta vritti.)

Consciousness is material so what we think effects others. Thought empinges on the object of thought: Highly advanced yogi might think of a person as dead that person will find his death. If I think good….. Desani has seen it.

Thought is substance. Think Sattva will increase, it will. Think Raja as increasing, it will. Think Tamas as increasing and it will. Example of a teacher at Cambridge hitting a student who questioned whether thought could be proved to be a substance in the stomach with a visualized (by thought) heavy object. Desmond hit his student, turned, whirled to face student. The student fell, was hospitalized, almost died. Desani said this was a petty trick. Also a man worked ten years to perfect a trick whereby he could not be moved by five men from a train he refused to pay for. He thought heavy object into existence at the base of his spine. That is, he cultivated Tamas at the base of his spine.

There are four states of consciousness. Awake, sleep, profound sleep, Samadhi.

One must practice and practice detachment.

The intellect is material. If it is mirror like, superior material, it is comprised mostly of Sattva.

Purusha is masculine, the divine father. Prakriti is feminine, the divine mother.

This is a workup which I might edit later.

Irwin Lieb, formerly Chairman of the University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Department, and my professor, stated that the only individual is the entire Universe itself. We are only nominally individuals, he said.

Vedas: Soul of man is same as soul of universe

(Svetasvatara) Upanishad: He is not a male, He is not a female,He is not a neuter. He neither is nor is not. When He is sought He will take the form in which He is sought, and again He will not come in such a form. … It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord.

Buddhism: There is no soul; there is nothing permanent.

Christian Bible (Exodus): Tell them “I Am” sends you (to Moses)

Albert Einstein: Speed of light depends on the “observer”.

(How to resolve these)

Rabbinic: Man is in partnership with “maker of heaven” in the continuing work of creation

Compare Rig Veda 10.129 with Parmenides (see David Goldman)

Compare this to Gita/Vedas: For the Greeks, time is the demarcation of events. But in Hebrew time, it is the moment itself that remains imperceptible. As Kohelet 3:15 states: “That which is, already has been; and that which is to be has already been; and only God can find the fleeting moment.” From David Goldman

Soloveitchik, “Lonely Man of Faith”: at end, pgs. 59 on he succinctly characterizes the dilemma of modern man in terms that have a ring of truth. Could compare to Rougemont and Kierkegaard, e.g. Compare also with Bhagavad Gita’s characterization of “man of faith”, or, as Soloveitchik terms him, “Adam the second”. “Faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality….Faith is experienced not as a product of some emergent evolutionary process…”

So I guess this might mean, contrary to what I have thought, it isn’t a concomitant of consciousness?  I don’t understand how eternity can be an an intrusion at all. I think the temporal is as likely as not designed to make eternity meaningful.

Goldman on Beethoven and the sublime: “The Sublime challenges us to conceive of something that transcends the way we process sense information. Because the Sublime demands our intellectual response, it evokes freedom: We are not the passive observer of fixed and limited phenomena, but the artist’s collaborator in the recreation of the art work. We must lift our spiritual level to engage it.”

Goldman applies Soloveitchik’s thesis here that “Man is in partnership with the “maker of heaven” in the continuing work of creation.”

The Jews were brought out of Egypt, bondage, crossed a river via a miracle. Americans were brought out of the Old World, escaping servitude, crossed an ocean, resumed their journey across the continent, seeking an ever escaping redemption.

On reading Milton Rothman’s “The Laws of Physics” and Bishop George Berkely’s theories on motion:

“There is motion only in relation between objects.”

Apply to understanding and knowledge.

Knowledge is always of the “other”; only in relation between objects.

Understanding, on the other hand, does not require multiplicity. See (Nous) Noesis, intuition. Understanding is reflexive, consciousness returning on itself, R.G. Collingwood. Only when multiplicity is dropped can understanding arise. Apply this to Goldman on Beethoven, above. Understanding is sublime, is the finest exemplar of true Freedom. It is transcendence. It is not a thing but a verb. It is merging of the soul of man with the “I Am” of Exodus. The state of passive observation of “fixed and limited phenomena” must be dropped, pass away. Only then can the “I Am” take the forefront. Only then can we truly exercise collaboration with Being, with the Art of a Beethoven, the Philosophy of a Soloveitchik or a LIeb.

M. de Rougemont intends with his analysis of the literature surrounding the Tristan and Isolde myth, its development through the centuries, to diagnose the breakdown of western civilisation, especially marriage. While he believes he succeeds he stops short of prescribing a solution thinking instead it would likely do more harm than good. He adopts the attitude that its best to just let it play out hoping along the way we don’t destroy ourselves in the process. For, indeed, the morphology of the myth in its final stages invests our predatory nature with fantastic war making abilities augmented, it seems, with ever increasing machine, and now computerized, and it would seem biological, methods of killing vast numbers of people, whole populations, or segments thereof.

Though he makes no prescription for the culture as a whole he does embrace Soren Kierkegaard’s views on coping with the madness.

Cite SK. Pg 315: Adopts Kierkegaard’s view as his own that human life tends to proceed in stages from the aesthetic through the ethical, ending in faith. Passion, he thinks, is “the highest value in the aesthetic stage” while extolling marriage as the highest in the ethical. But marriage is claimed to be the highest obstruction in the religious stage for it fetters one to time whereas faith requires eternity.

In this writer’s view the image of the sword placed between Tristan and Iseult as they sleep signifies what is said about renouncing marriage as an obstruction when entering life’s final stage of faith. “Goal was no longer redemption through love but redemption through renunciation.” One gives up passion, love, in favor of dissolving the little self with the eternal. This is why Tristan can say I am the whole world as Wagner has him do.

Doesn’t this correspond nicely with Kierkegaard’s attitude? Rougemont writes: “When the lover in the Manichaean legend has undergone the great ordeals of initiation he is met … by a dazzling maiden who welcomes him with the words: ‘I am thyself!’ So with fidelity in the myth, and Tristan’s. Fidelity is then a mystic narcissism … imagining itself to be true love for the other. In analysing the courtly legends, however, we saw that Tristan is not in love with Iseult, but with love itself, and beyond love he is really in love with death – that is, with the only possible release there can be for a self guilty and enslaved. Tristan is true neither to a pledge nor to a symbolical being named Iseult. She is but a lovely pretext, and all the time he is being true to his most profound and secret passion. The myth seizes on ‘the death instinct’ inseparable from any form of created life, and transfigures it by bestowing upon it an essentially spiritual goal. To destroy oneself, to despise happiness is thereupon a way of salvation and of acceding to a higher life, to ‘the highest bliss of being’ sung of by the expiring Isolde (in Wagner’s opera).” Life for the sake of death was Tristan’s passion and “The love of Tristan and Iseult was the anguish of being two; and its culmination was a headlong fall into the limitless bosom of Night….Iseult is no more, Tristan no more, and no name can any longer part us!”

Kierkegaard’s existential anguish, his fear and trembling (Frygt og Baevan) resulting from the lost love of his Regine brought him low and he ended as a “fatally unhappy” man which he equates with man’s relation with an eternal and holy God from the standpoint of the finite and sinful human. He said “God creates everything ex nihilo.” Whomsoever God elects by his love, “He begins by reducing to nothing.” This, he said, makes God “my mortal enemy.” M. de Rougement writes: “Here we are being brought up against the extreme limit, the pure springs of passion; and in the same moment we are thrust into the heart of the Christian faith! For, behold! the man now dead to the world, killed by infinite love, has to go forward and to live in the world….(such a man) has renounced all things with an infinite resignation, and …. is constantly leaping into the infinite, but faultlessly and with complete confidence, so that he drops back into the finite, and nothing is noticeable about him but the finite.”

Finally, Rougemont continues: “Thus the extremity of passion – death in love -introduces a new life, where passion never ceases to be present, but is under the most jealous incognito; for it is now far more than regal, it is divine.” (This is in contradiction to his former exegesis of the myth, in this writer’s opinion, but is in reality much nearer the actual Truth. While all that goes before goads the reader into plumbing the myth’s and western civilization’s morbidity his final summation and recap is rather uplifting, offers some hope.)

This makes sense, I think, of Tristan’s “I am the world” attitude. Whereas mystic union, the explanation thereof, fails completely one can nevertheless circumscribe it, though perhaps only in increasingly vague terms. While it admittedly is a slippery matter perhaps one learns that though it evades our attempts to grasp or hold it we can gain somewhat by just accepting it (with cupped hands, so to speak). Receive instead of take, in other words. Denis de Rougemont is a master of all this, as was Soren Kierkegaard, and for that matter Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha – its a long list. Suffice to say, Rougemont continues: “We are unendingly and incessantly in the thick of the struggle between nature and grace; unendingly and incessantly unhappy and then happy. But the horizon has not remained the same. A fidelity maintained in the name of what does not change as we change will gradually disclose some of its mystery: beyond tragedy another happiness waits. A happiness resembling the old, but no longer belonging to the form of the world, for this new happiness transforms the world.

As said elsewhere Beauty is infinite, eternal, ever increasing, ever glorifying the divine. To get a little taste of this is man’s lot gained by living in the finite, as intended, but from an eternal perspective. And, quoting Mr. T.S. Eliot, “when arriving at our destination we see it as our beginning but know it for the first time.”

Infinite resignation is like total surrender to God……only then can we live perfectly in imperfection. Also said elsewhere in this blog, though its in error to ascribe to G_d anything at all, not even being itself (after all, Soren Kierkegaard himself, and he was and is known as a Christian philosopher, actually stood in the pulpit and expounding on faith, said that God does not exist. Why? Simplicity itself – “He is eternal” – that’s why. That should need no explanation. And yet, in Exodus, appearing in a burning bush before Moses, asked “who shall I say sent me?”, he replies, ” Say that ‘I am’ sends you.”)  it nevertheless dips into the limitless vastness of Beauty and Love and Truth to say that we sentient life forms, human beings on planet Earth, are the eyes and ears of the Cosmos, that simple device whereby G_d, if you like, has, or gains self realization, self understanding. The horizon of discovery is thus ever and anon pushed into infinity with we humans in endless renewal making pursuit. At the very least, I think, we are of the same stuff as the Sun, so our perception is no doubt the Sun’s way of knowing itself. As stated this can not be explained for it is a matter of direct knowledge, Noesis, from which derives the noosphere wherein we find the concomitants of consciousness.

I’m on page 269. I wish I could recall which university course this book goes with. Of course it was philosophy, but don’t recall which one. Perhaps William Poteat’s course on “Eroticism, Music, and Madness”. Seems fitting.

Details on the book: A Fawcett Premier Book copyright 1940, Harcourt, Brace and Company. This augmented edition copyrighted 1956, Pantheon Books, Inc., published by Fawcett World Library. Translated by Montgomery Belgion.

M. Rougemont was born in 1906 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. I once knew people there, interestingly, had a girl friend. Francoise Tschudin. They lived on the lake in Hauterive, Neuchatel. Beside the point, I know.

Rougemont views human relations through the lens of the Tristan and Isolde myth which dates from about the twelfth century. He cites multiple versions, multiple authors, with the troubadours playing the major part, at least in the beginning. He writes that the underlying theme of the myth is that Passion is Love perverted, is narcissistic. Literature of that time, and he cites many following works, is an expression of this perversion. The myth coincides with the beginning of civilization’s departure into this gross error. His thesis, in part, is that this myth promotes common or acceptable behavior in the culture. Rougemont really gets down in the weeds. His genius, pg. 275: “…passion of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover’s self-magnification, far more than it is a relation with the beloved. Tristan wanted the branding of love more than he wanted the possession of Iseult (Isolde). For he believed that the intense and devouring flame of passion would make him divine; and, as Wagner grasped, the equal of the world. See here.

Eyes with joy are blinded …                                                                                                      I myself am the world.

Whatever obstructs love actually consolidates, intensifies it, he writes. (Pg 43) The ultimate obstruction of love is the aim of the romantic who seeks the ultimate intensity, passion, consolidation. The romantic seeks unity. What expresses this better than  “I myself am the world?” The ultimate obstruction of love is death. The romantic seeks death but calls it passion. So, if obstruction is the true object of passion, the beloved is a mere substitute. And if peril brings obstruction the affinity for the thrilling arises. M. Rougemount describes enlightenment and redemption as “passing from existence into being.” The desire to exceed our limits is “fatal but divinizing.”

As mentioned earlier he works Mozart’s Don Giovanni into his thesis but doesn’t mention Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard thought of passion as a force of nature calling it the Daemonic in Nature, a sensuous-erotic principle. M. Rougemont agrees but doesn’t acknowledge this profound idea – at least not directly. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (Edit: at end of book he brings SK in.)

As an aside gravity is a force of nature, too, and spin, without which there is no vector, direction, or for that matter, congruence. Life too is a force of nature.

Rougemont strives mightily to quantify literature so that it confirms this thinking. There is some obfuscation there but his genius prevails though it is a bit messy at times. As I say, he really gets down in the weeds. There is a confirmation bias with him and, I’d note that the more we cling to our pet ideas the more we exclude the real truth. [And, what is true locally may be false universally.] Kierkegaard quickly elevates perverted Christian love to the universal daemonic in nature. So does M. Rougemont. Pg. 275: “Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things, as solitary and powerful as God. Without knowing it, passion also requires that beyond its apotheosis death shall indeed be the end of all things.”

Death is made an enervating force, finally making of war the inevitable outcome of passion’s grip on humanity. William Poteat, and G.V. Desani also spoke of this. Desani said that the end of the development of war making machines, devices, ended necessarily in man’s annihilation. Kierkegaard also thought annihilation was the natural end of the development of the “sensuous-erotic” principle.

We do hug and kiss our self destruction, the spokes of the wheel whose turning returns us again and again to our beloved suffering because of which we feel alive. The more we suffer passion’s pains the more intense our lives. Passionate love is for the sake of pain. And the more we pursue our passions the faster their fulfillment recedes on an ever disappearing horizon.

There’s no escape. Eastern religion and philosophy address these root causes and while Rougemont brings them into his subject he fails to address the reality of their suggested remedies. Neither does he acknowledge the esoteric teachings of the ancient rabbinic Jews. While he and Kierkegaard advance the notion that Christianity is not what we are led to believe it is, that it is in reality a destructive force, as it is popularized, they provide no insights as to the path one must take to escape the enumerated conundrums. (Editor: see next post)

On the Daemonic in nature. Love is in the noosphere so passion is too but not naturally in that created man puts it there. True love enhances life. Passion destroys. True love is selfless.