Mendacity Lost
We were honored yesterday by a visit from one of Dr. Bob Godwin's alter egos, a sprite by the name of "Petey." The graceful Peteywin 'lowed as how the Mouse's knowledge of philosophy is somewhat "rudimentary." Jeez, that really hurt. This "wee sleekit, timorous, cowrin' beastie" ain't got a letter to his name, but even if he had, he doubts that his ability to shoot the proverbial shit could in any way match the merde-acious agility of the good doctor. The doc's recent dissertation on the eternal female far surpassed anything the Mouse might have squeaked on his best days. It doesn't detract a bit from its cleverness that it was all an imaginary concoction, in the same genre as Herr Hegel's master-slave allegory that has for a couple of centuries titillated the shrunken heads of Marxists. Equating the Virgin Mary with Adam's lady Eve is sort of like making Charlie Brown's little piano playing friend Schroeder the archetype of the Greek Muse. Makes a whole lot of sense, but has the effect of giving the Muse more reality than she ever possessed. She was an invention of be-mused Greeks who were stuck for a way to explain the appeal of poetry better than the mathematical rhythms of Pythagoras's heartbeat.
That's the problem with "spiraling" knowledge around the maypoles of ancient superstitions. We encode vast stretches of our neuronal territory with religious "truths" and from those imaginary premises, create an apparently "integral and consistent philosophy that embraces psychology, anthropology, metaphysics, political science, and various other fields." Sheltered by widely believed falsehood, our misconceptions protected from hard fact, we are unable -- perhaps ever -- to see their foundation. Obtaining "a relief from certain kinds of fear" from our creation, we abide in a veritable fortress, nursing our very real Yangs and Yens on the milk of imaginary goodness. Small wonder that "Everything in it [our philosophy] implies and entails everything else." Without the hard edges of fact to restrain our "muse" coherency comes easy.
That was another of the esoteric (and largely undetected) meanings Joyce stormed over the bridge with his two stream of consciousness novels. In Ulysses, he made the myths obvious, framed his plot on the trappings of an ancient poem, and by that device demonstrated, in a fairly superficial way, how great fictitious intrigues can be wrought of superstition and legend by the hands of genius. In Finnegan's Wake, feeling he had made a good first novel but that his point had been missed, Joyce threaded the myths into a fabric woven mostly of his own history, and consequently his own prejudices, and did it so obscurely -- ineffectively, that is -- that the point was still missed. We did not get it from Joyce that the shadows lurking between the stimuluses and responses of human experience are actually impenetrable. We still did not get it that when we build our philosophies and religions on inherited myths, we're building on the quick sand of the shadow.
Hence the appeal of empiricism to many grownups. They sense in themselves the ineffable myths of humanity's childhood, and because they hear in the word "myth" something immature and presumably untrue, they shy away from even their awareness of the shadow. In defense, they refer their conscious minds to so-called objective fact and by that disregard of the aesthetic, block huge areas of their psyches from direct experience of the greater world they might have seen had they waked up to the true nature of Oneness.
God is One. He was not made One by the insinuations of myth and religion. He is One because to imagine him otherwise is essentially impossible without applying to imagination. If God and the cosmos are truly one, we were not created, we became. God was never a creator God in any sense other than we might say Leonardo was a creative painter. God was and is a Becomer, an understanding of him that fits well with all the laws of physics and evolutuionary biology, while appealing still to the aesthetic substrate of human knowing.
If Spinoza were alive today, and if he were a blogger, he might observe that even though God usually appears to us in modal form, we occasionally become aware of his wholeness. We sense the infinite in ourselves, and call those sensations religious experiences. To deny their reality would be to deny the reported experiences of millions. They occur to believers of all religions and have generally been interpreted as experiences of another world. We have experienced something so different from the world of "things" that we surely must have been transported beyond the realm of ordinary life. When we return from our escape of its presence, we generally find ourselves no better able to distinguish the difference between substance and its modes than we were before, but that there is a difference has become for us a fact we subsequently have great difficulty denying. Having "seen" the infinite we more easily recognize the ordinariness of iron, dirt and "stuff."
Technically, we may say (with Spinoza) that the ordinary things of the world have been "conceived through something else." We may also agree that our extraordinary perception of God can be axiomatically explained by thinking of his substance as "conceived through itself." But our religious experience does not depend upon our understanding of Spinoza’s definitions, since millions have experienced God in that way who have never heard of Spinoza. We are caused to experience wholeness because the whole of God is real and we are integral parts of whatever he is.
Spinoza attempted to describe the nature of God as it is possible for human beings to understand him. To do that, it was first necessary to strip away aeons of imaginings. If Spinoza succeeded, then we have in our possession an unchanging structure upon which we may erect a finite and changeable picture of the world as we see it. Whether we succeed or fail will be a function of our understanding of God and Nature. Sin is the fruit of ignorance, with the worst sin of all, temptation of the ignorant by clever pretense, masking the ancient and fatuous superstitions of the past in the shrouds of eloquence.
It is not that many have seen God. It is that a few would have us believe that only they have seen.
Believe me. They lie.
That's the problem with "spiraling" knowledge around the maypoles of ancient superstitions. We encode vast stretches of our neuronal territory with religious "truths" and from those imaginary premises, create an apparently "integral and consistent philosophy that embraces psychology, anthropology, metaphysics, political science, and various other fields." Sheltered by widely believed falsehood, our misconceptions protected from hard fact, we are unable -- perhaps ever -- to see their foundation. Obtaining "a relief from certain kinds of fear" from our creation, we abide in a veritable fortress, nursing our very real Yangs and Yens on the milk of imaginary goodness. Small wonder that "Everything in it [our philosophy] implies and entails everything else." Without the hard edges of fact to restrain our "muse" coherency comes easy.
That was another of the esoteric (and largely undetected) meanings Joyce stormed over the bridge with his two stream of consciousness novels. In Ulysses, he made the myths obvious, framed his plot on the trappings of an ancient poem, and by that device demonstrated, in a fairly superficial way, how great fictitious intrigues can be wrought of superstition and legend by the hands of genius. In Finnegan's Wake, feeling he had made a good first novel but that his point had been missed, Joyce threaded the myths into a fabric woven mostly of his own history, and consequently his own prejudices, and did it so obscurely -- ineffectively, that is -- that the point was still missed. We did not get it from Joyce that the shadows lurking between the stimuluses and responses of human experience are actually impenetrable. We still did not get it that when we build our philosophies and religions on inherited myths, we're building on the quick sand of the shadow.
Hence the appeal of empiricism to many grownups. They sense in themselves the ineffable myths of humanity's childhood, and because they hear in the word "myth" something immature and presumably untrue, they shy away from even their awareness of the shadow. In defense, they refer their conscious minds to so-called objective fact and by that disregard of the aesthetic, block huge areas of their psyches from direct experience of the greater world they might have seen had they waked up to the true nature of Oneness.
God is One. He was not made One by the insinuations of myth and religion. He is One because to imagine him otherwise is essentially impossible without applying to imagination. If God and the cosmos are truly one, we were not created, we became. God was never a creator God in any sense other than we might say Leonardo was a creative painter. God was and is a Becomer, an understanding of him that fits well with all the laws of physics and evolutuionary biology, while appealing still to the aesthetic substrate of human knowing.
If Spinoza were alive today, and if he were a blogger, he might observe that even though God usually appears to us in modal form, we occasionally become aware of his wholeness. We sense the infinite in ourselves, and call those sensations religious experiences. To deny their reality would be to deny the reported experiences of millions. They occur to believers of all religions and have generally been interpreted as experiences of another world. We have experienced something so different from the world of "things" that we surely must have been transported beyond the realm of ordinary life. When we return from our escape of its presence, we generally find ourselves no better able to distinguish the difference between substance and its modes than we were before, but that there is a difference has become for us a fact we subsequently have great difficulty denying. Having "seen" the infinite we more easily recognize the ordinariness of iron, dirt and "stuff."
Technically, we may say (with Spinoza) that the ordinary things of the world have been "conceived through something else." We may also agree that our extraordinary perception of God can be axiomatically explained by thinking of his substance as "conceived through itself." But our religious experience does not depend upon our understanding of Spinoza’s definitions, since millions have experienced God in that way who have never heard of Spinoza. We are caused to experience wholeness because the whole of God is real and we are integral parts of whatever he is.
Spinoza attempted to describe the nature of God as it is possible for human beings to understand him. To do that, it was first necessary to strip away aeons of imaginings. If Spinoza succeeded, then we have in our possession an unchanging structure upon which we may erect a finite and changeable picture of the world as we see it. Whether we succeed or fail will be a function of our understanding of God and Nature. Sin is the fruit of ignorance, with the worst sin of all, temptation of the ignorant by clever pretense, masking the ancient and fatuous superstitions of the past in the shrouds of eloquence.
It is not that many have seen God. It is that a few would have us believe that only they have seen.
Believe me. They lie.
posted by Benedict S. at 7:00 AM
4 Comments:
Only for me-lady's entertainment, you understand. Have a Milk Dud.
Interesting, but raises the question: does your lack of understanding what Bob is talking about surpass your lack of understanding what you are talking about, or vice versa?
Wel-l-l-l, a.zonips, maybe yes, maybe no. I will ask around.
[Long interval while the spirits are polled.]
Sorry, no one around here can help. Perhaps if you would be so kind as to explain what Bob and I are talking about. . . Is that asking too much?
Ah. Yes. I see. Bob sees in the ancient myths archetypes that reveal to him the nature of the Islamic mind, and I don't.
Now, I can answer your question. Yes. My lack of understanding what Bob is talking about surpasses my lack of understanding of what I am talking about.
Thanks for the assistance. I couldn't have done it without you.
After posting the reply to a.zonips I went over and read Bob's blog for today. While he still seems to depend on some sort of supernatural substructure for his philosophy (Jungian psychology came to mind) he has strung some fairly reasonable thoughts on that frail trellis.
One of the most common logical errors occurs to those who feel that because their conclusions make sense (i.e. seem true) their premises must also be true. To take a simple example: we may conclude from America's success as a nation that God loves us, but the conclusion does not justify the premise. We are, perhaps, successful because we rebeled against the tyranies of the monarchies, and were fortunate enough to have been informed by the liberal philosophies of John Locke. Of course, it is easy to claim that eventually, Locke derived his ideas from a "vertical" view, and as true as that may be, there is no reason to believe that view was inspired by anything other than human consciousness. We eventually come to a fork in the road if we trace consciousness back far enough, one fork leading to and thru the supernatural theories of the ancients, the other thru the land of the sciences and hard-rock reasoning. Perhaps those two roads bend toward each other, to meet somewhere in the minds of a people more able to deal with reality than those currently traveling the forking paths.
I vow to make a better effort in the future to find common ground with those whose views I share only in part.
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