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John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Luke 19: 35-40  And they brought him to Jesus: and they cast their garments upon the colt, and they set Jesus thereon.  And as he went, they spread their clothes in the way.  And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent of the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen;  Saying, Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest. And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples.  And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.

The intake of your breath is the exhalation of the universe.  Your exhalation is the breathing in of the Universe.

In my last post I wrote about the first act of creation, of the principle of illumination.  But what is the Word?  Isn’t it just a primordial principle capable of self actualizing.  Think of Greek Logos or Hebrew Davar;  first principle with the power to manifest itself, or, potentiality with the power to self actualize.  Then think of the rose.  The actualization of the rose is endless.  There is no actual rose, only potential.   Likewise, there is no concrete “word” or “truth” or “beauty”.  There is no now, no present.  Try and hold onto one.  If there were we could own these but since we can’t we are only borrowers.  The word is in the manifested cosmos, and vice versa, as the rose is in the bud and the bud is in the rose; for every actuality there is a new potentiality.  And, my sight of the rose is the rose’s means of seeing itself.

We know nothing, really, any more than we can hold onto the present.  It’s best to let God keep his secrets.  Many claim God “loves” them.  I don’t know but intuit rather that God is Love.  We are blessed to participate in this Love and in this moment; my concern is not that he loves me but that I love him.  The potentiality of love of the deity is in the very rocks at our feet.  The emergence of sentient life gives voice to these stones.  It’s because we don’t or can’t fully know that we have a sense of wonder, awe, and an appreciation of beauty and truth. These keep us searching, make the journey ever new whether it really is or not.  Were the truth about the ultimate purpose and meaning of existence vouchsafed to us reality might be as boring to us as it must be to God without his life in and through his creation.  Christ is the word made flesh, it is written.  I write that the whole of Reality is the manifesting Word.

The Star of David and the symbol for the Hindu sacred syllable Om.  The esoteric meaning of the Star of David is that God descends into matter in order to reascend a self realized spiritual being.  That is another way of stating Christ is the word made flesh.  I think the Om symbol has the same meaning.  The sacred syllable Om is the equivalent of the Word.  Our voice is the rocks crying out.

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I continue my reading of Aristotle at the Metaphysics as an oblique reference to these thoughts.

I don’t find the word preacher appealing.  It means minister or sermonizer.  It also means Ecclesiastic.  But Solomons are rare.   My problem is, I guess, and they are not alone in this at all, preachers make you feel the heat but if you want to see the light, move on because the heat of their passion effectively blocks out any enlightenment.  Conceded, heat is a form of light, and does give comfort if you are out in the cold.  So does passion, and they do communicate passionately, and this is good because faith begins in the heart.  It is felt, not reasoned.  That feeling is the first tentative step to wisdom, understanding, light.  Preachers compare to sophists.  Rhetoric is their main faculty; and they both pass the collection plate from Protagoras on down.  But truth can’t be conveyed rhetorically.  Truth is not something that can be taught, or bought.  Only “things” are teachable.  Truth might inform things.  So might beauty.  But you can’t teach beauty any more than truth itself.  Both are available to be realized, not learned.  Truth and beauty and the other concomitants of consciousness are aspects, facets, of the spirit that confer universality.  Sermonizers pray for this or that, implying they have power to move God in their favor, and, more to the point, that you can too.  Well, “Deeds can’t dream what dreams can do”, but, intention plays a greater part, I think, than actual work on behalf of the petitioner by the divine creative force behind the whole existential Reality.  What really happens in these settings is a longing for the Real, for truth, is set up but never fulfilled.  Instead they are satisfied with their dogma, which can be taught, and is bought, dearly.  But dogma does not confer universality and truth does and the sophist’s belief he has a direct pipeline to truth, in the final analysis, tragically shuts off the possibility of discovery.

To be clear, I don’t doubt the divinity of Christ, or any man, not that all men are Gods.  Is a drop of water the ocean?  I submit Christ understood how it was, and more importantly, how it wasn’t.  People following this path like to say, “I know God loves me.”  First of all, how selfish.  Secondly, say to them, if God loves everything the same then it begins to look a lot like indifference, and watch their eyes glaze over.  Their God is anthropogenic and the lie to their “faith” is that the more they pursue it the more they claim certitude.  Its true, rather, that real faith results in greater doubt, trepidation, humility, the closer one approaches the divine.  In the end one arrives at a sort of infinite resignation that knowing God is impossible.

Its written that in the beginning was the Word and the first act of creation was of light.  Leaving aside what is the Word think of the light as principle, not as visible light, per se.  As principle, illumination is participated in by the various forms, the concomitants of consciousness, e.g. Love, Liberty, Truth, Beauty, Grace, Wisdom, and so on.  All of these pertain to the substance of things; they are aspects of the indwelling spirit, of the potentiality inhering in the energia of matter and of the entelechy, the end within.  It is the form of things that facilitate display of these and in doing so universality is conferred on the subject by their presence.  The form makes a thing, a painting, for instance, individual, but it is the beauty that gives it appeal, universality.  Forms make the concomitants intelligible, available, individual.  The concomitants make the individuals universal.  People like to ask what a work of art means.  It doesn’t mean anything.  It is a question; Who am I?  If it is a beautiful piece the answer is; I am everything that is.  My meaning and purpose consists in the instantiation of beauty in this individual object.  Likewise for love and the others.  You can’t teach love, liberty, wisdom, grace, beauty, but your life is enriched beyond compare if you can find paths that participate in the divine light in which these qualities facilitate the awakening, the apotheosis, of the divine.  You can be Love, Freedom, Wise, Grace, Beauty; Truth can be lived.  No learning necessary.  To borrow from T.S. Eliot, the drop of water slips into the shining sibilant sea and arriving where it began knows the place for the first time.

My son, Christopher M. Hinds, turned 26 this past Sunday.  Granddaughter, Eleanor Margarete Hinds, was two Sept. 6.  Nice photos at this link, Au Coeur blog.  They live on Nantucket.  Also, Christopher’s mother, Helen Elizabeth Ragsdale was born this month.  Sept. 16.

Soren Kierkegaard, the great Christian philosopher, wrote that “God does not think, he creates.  God does not exist, he is eternal.”  Athiests ignorantly deny God because they can’t find empirical evidence.  At the same time religionists claim they do experience God, many claiming to even talk to “him”, but mostly they “feel” his presence.

But, experience is anthropomorphic.  God can’t be experienced any more than can eternity and his mind can’t be known because thinking is not his function.  Knowing his creation is knowing his work, surely, but not him directly.  Experience relates to things.  You are a thing.  All you experience is a thing.  God is not a thing.  You can’t experience not thing, God.  He doesn’t exist, he creates.  When my religious friends say they can feel the spirit of God they are really feeling themselves.  That is, their religious experience is a form of self love, self worship.  Finally, Being is not the same thing, infinitely.  Each instance is all there is and the next an entirely new creation but based on the preceding.  Does a waterfall ever change?  Can you put your hand in the same river twice?  Essence does not precede existence.  Existence precedes essence; Existential means this.  To say essence precedes existence is to claim to know God, an impossibility. The form of a table is new for every instance of table, just like the river or the waterfall.

The Scream, 1893, Edvard Munch

In a constant state of dread wanting only to understand with the full knowledge that is impossible.  G. K. Chesterton thought the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason.  Reason is the giver of false hope.  If it’s reasonable, if it can be measured, is that the same as knowing, as understanding?  I don’t think so.  All one Knows really is the metric, that by which measurement is made and that metric when reduced to the lowest common denominator is the thing, our physical body.  Measurement is not understanding but it might lead to same.  When attachment arises wisdom is shut out.  That something is reasonable ends up being such attachment.  Any answer worth anything can only be intuited.  It’s direct, unfiltered, knowledge that satisfies the heart.  The darkness that is ever dogging us, the dread of meaningless and essentially empty purpose leaves one with only one choice, to be taken with infinite resignation, and that is the leap of faith.  The reasonable man wants to own truth but what’s true is that truth owns him.

If the whole of reality is an apotheosis then it seems obvious every instance is new.  “G_d” wouldn’t waste time doing the same thing over and over.  This obviates Nietzsche’s  notion that its the same thing  repeated infinitely.  The very fact that species mutate is proof enough the process more resembles a fractal than a simple progression; and any eventuation is rooted in a universal principle.  Light, e.g., is not just light, but an expression on many levels of the principle of illumination.  The nucleus of an atom illuminates its electrons follows the same principle that a star illuminates its planets and a lord his disciples.  Likewise, the star confers universality on the planets and they confer on the star individuality.  Aristotle thought matter conferred universality, form individuality.  In the same vein, God gives man universality while man confers on the Deity individuality.  He is the author of apotheosis, his creation the instrumentality.  He doesn’t just live in his creatures, but through them he knows himself, has the illusion of sleeping and waking, dieing and being born.  It is infinitely self-inventing, and every instantiation increases and enriches the pregnancy for ensuing evolution. All that will ever be is already actual in the “beginning” even though all that will ever be is an elaboration on the infinite stream of prior instances. Every new instance is a new beginning and a new boundary for the new. Every new instantiation is an elaboration of its predecessor. And, our heavens are self made as are our hells. It’s all about individual responsibility and self-reliance. Belief in nothing gets you just that.

“Gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind.”

“When attachment arises wisdom is shut out.”

I am in your eyes for others to see.

Bodies mediate the meeting of souls; but souls meet each other immediately when eyes meet. The depth in the pupil of the eye is the quiet place that gives meaning to such encounters. Just a glance into the eyes of another is to directly encounter the depths of the abyss rendering attachment impossible. Creatures are often startled by another’s gaze, and rightly so, for at that moment infinity looks into infinity.

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Eroticism, Music, and Madness (Cont’d)

Meaning presupposes itself. Formal activity in the human mind has its roots in the form paradigmatic for an individual, namely, the body, and the paradigmatic act is speech, utterance, giving of the word, rooted in the Greek, Logos, reason, the word; controlling principle of the universe manifest by speech. From the Bible, John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the word was made flesh..” Giving of the Word, the first principle, is like the axle of a wheel, all meaning, movement, is presupposed, sensible, in so far as the center, the first principle, the axle, is stationary.

Language has a way of assuming the form of its objects. We say chair to reference a real thing. Math and music have an abstract relationship to existential mass. Mathematics has in common with music the fact that it does not have reflex pronouns, egocentric particulars; it has no terms like speech. Music has element in time, mathematics not. Music and mathematics take us out of the world; attending to them in a sense places one in a non-material place. But mathematics is static as a medium while music is a dynamic medium. Mathematics takes us out of the world in the Cartesian sense that it is of the mind which is separate from body. Mathematics joined with science and technology becomes a dynamic which hurriedly takes us out of the world, much more than music; consider nuclear weapons, e.g.  People aren’t careful with their speech as in times past and as speech has become less responsible music has taken over, it is that by which we are encouraged to fulfill, or rather escape from ourselves.

What about expression in architecture? Architecture employs the concrete medium of existential mass. Look at the endurance of the thrusting movement of architecturally rendered faith, the leap toward edification seen in a great Gothic cathedral. Architecture is concrete by virtue of its duration in time; it endures of itself. Words must be spoken, mathematical formulas contemplated, but music is the true contrary of existential mass in respect of being the most abstract medium. It does not endure by itself in time, but only by virtue of its being played. Architecture endures by itself in time because it also exists in space; music has no existence in space, and thereby lacks the characteristic of enduring in time, so we can say that music is the most abstract medium.

What does it mean for a medium to be the most abstract? It means, simply, that it is most minimal. Don Juan seeks immediacy. He minimizes the mediate. Mystery, discover, the sense of being on the brink of life fulfilling experience grows with increasing economy of means, and increasing risk.  Musical life has the highest economy; it only exists in time and abstracts the soul thus from the material.  Ambition is alien and confining to the basic truth of reality for the sensuous genius, which is openness or vulnerability itself.   Music minimizes the mediate, and in this respect it is the ideal expression of Don Juanism. The apparent flow of time is the most essential characteristic of immediacy. In mediation there are varieties of things which come to us one at a time, sequentially. Remove the sequential aspect of the world of objects as they pass in the stream of consciousness and you have immediacy. In immediacy sequentiality becomes secondary to the ostensible flow of time just in itself thus obviating the intentional thickness of consciousness which results from the repression of unselective consciousness in favor of selective consciousness. Music carries us away, out of ourselves, destroying intention. Architectural expression of Christian faith points to the heavens as where the human soul will find completion. Music likewise expresses a reaching for what is impossibly beyond grasping. The word was made flesh and flesh artificially separates itself from that paradigmatic act that is being lost in the spirit of the sensuous. The long sabbatical from language and the descent into the musical expresses the urge for immediacy, to be in the world but not of it. Self gratification regardless of the consequence is the hallmark. Don Juanism is cultural psychopathology. Narcissism, confusion, and estrangement are its fruits. The implications of unrestrained sensuousness date from the romantic period, the revolt of the 18th and early 19th century against the artistic, political, philosophical, and religious principles associated with neoclassicism. It is characterized in literature and philosophy by irrationality, fancy, fabulousness, impracticality, and emphasizes above all else feeling and originality. It is of the heart, not of the mind. Everything is transitory, the individual self is the only certitude. The most valid response to anything is the emotional one. From the religious to the political, from the artistic to the scientific, this error of elevating feelings above all other consideration reigns. The wheel has come off the axle.  Emotion has its place but when conflated with faith whether in religion, science, or anything else, and sought as an end in itself, when this attachment arises, wisdom is shut out, spiritual devolution follows. One hears in the exhortations of the fanatics whether religious, scientific, or whatever, that they are addicts of their own pathos.  One hears in their tearful, dolorous  apocalyptic prophecy a music of exhortation calling us to their version of the only dance there is.  They have completely lost sight of Truth.  There are real consequences to having a false concept of reality.  I like to say the world is infinitely malleable; we get to make of it whatsoever we wish.  That is, in fact, our commission.  But without a solid foundation it gets increasingly difficult to keep the thing from collapsing.  Man is in his infancy yet.  So take heart.  The Sun will be here for another four and a half billion years and continues to orbit the hub of the Milky Way every 280 million years.  That wheel goes round and round while false religion, science, politics, and philosophy will have their day and in passing give sustenance to new growth.  The Word, Logos, and other expressions of the first principle endure forever and when you look deeply into another’s eyes you can see forever the stars there which though distant are yet present to the mind.

Yoga and Vipassana Meditation, pdf of a lecture by Professor Desani in Rangoon, Burma.  I’ve written about Desani elsewhere in this blog. Desani.org, linked in my right panel, hosts this pdf.  I’m grateful to Todd Katz for his efforts in maintaining the Desani.org site.

Everywhere Aristotle utilizes the phases of qualities passing into and out of their opposite states as an anchor to the progress of his thinking.  Generation and Corruption studied as contraries is fitting to this basic principle or method and it fits his contention that the Real is always at least two in number.

Coming to be necessarily implies the pre-existence of something which potentially ‘is’, but actually ‘is not’;  and this something is spoken of both as ‘being’ and as ‘not-being’.

Coming to be occurs in the region about the centre. (of the Universe, i.e., Earth)  The originative sources of generation are first matter and form.  A third originative source must also be present for while it is characteristic of matter to suffer action, i.e. to be moved:  to move, i.e. to act, belongs to a different ‘power’.  Things assume forms which are their essential nature.

The third originative source is the alternating approach and retreat of the Sun, which corresponds with generation and corruption.  “Coming-to-be and passing-away will, as we have said, always be continuous, and will never fail owing to the cause we stated. And this continuity has a sufficient reason on our theory. For in all things, as we affirm, Nature always strives after ‘the better’. Now ‘being’… is better than ‘not-being’: but not all things can possess ‘being’, since they are too far removed from the ‘originative source. ‘God therefore adopted the remaining alternative, and fulfilled the perfection of the universe by making coming-to-be uninterrupted: for the greatest possible coherence would thus be secured to existence, because that ‘coming-to-be should itself come-to-be perpetually’ is the closest approximation to eternal being.“

The cause of this perpetuity of generation is circular motion:  for that is the only motion which is continuous.  “… if there is to be movement… there must be something which initiates it; if there is to be movement always, there must always be something which initiates it; if the movement is to be continuous, what initiates it must be single, unmoved, ungenerated, and incapable of ‘alteration’; and if the circular movements are more than one, their initiating causes must all of them, in spite of their plurality, be in some way subordinated to a single ‘originative source’.”

“…a thing is eternal if its ‘being’ is necessary:  and if it is eternal, its ‘being’ is necessary.  And if, therefore, the ‘coming-to-be’ of a thing is necessary, its ‘coming-to-be’ is eternal;  and if eternal necessary.

“It follows that the coming-to-be of anything, if it is absolutely necessary, must be cyclical—i.e. must return upon itself….

“The result we have reached is logically concordant with the eternity of circular motion, i.e. the eternity of the revolution of the heavens.”

I seize on a couple of statements here in particular, for instance, coming to be is an effort by grace to mirror the divine’s eternal being by itself being a coming to be perpetually;  he says a gift of God.  And the idea put forth that generation being circular exhibits the characteristic of returning on itself echos the notion that the essential nature of consciousness shares the same trait.

So, the center, Earth, is where generation and corruption take place and the ultimate cause is bound up in,  is made perceptible, by the circular movement of the fixed stars in the outer most sphere, that is, heaven.  The abode of the imperishable and perfect affects all the coming to be and passing away we creatures suffer in the lowest regions, the Earth.  The Sun is made to follow its alternating approach and retreat by the higher revolutions of the outermost sphere of fixed stars.  It in turn imparts the necessity of generation and corruption to what is beneath its orbit.   Aristotle further assigns decreasing powers to the elements both primary and simple being Earth, Air, Fire, Water which in their turn come and go in their own orbits alternatively creating and destroying what is within their purviews.

Next, De Anima