I’ve always been a fan of the eclectic Joe Jackson, and had an opportunity to see him in concert recently for his Fool album/four-decade tour. The first single off the album, Fabulously Absolute, is a tad cynical lyrically with one of the best words ever used in a song: troglodyte (which is a person considered to be reclusive, reactionary, out of fashion, or brutish... hmm, I can relate on some days). Moreover, the playful song title conjures up an interesting reflection. After all, does today’s culture see anything as fabulously absolute, or more like depressingly relative? First and foremost, if you assume it's all relative, then you've made that into an absolute. No escape. So can we at least consider some of the universals that are relatively Absolute? There seems to be many features of culture, language, and behavior that are found in common to all people known: we all seem to believe murder and stealing is wrong; we all hold something as sacrosanct; we all have bias towards kinship, privilege in-group loyalty, and believe in fairness and duty; we all practice reciprocal exchanges of labor, goods, or services; and we all look for patterns and relations in things. Just to name a few. There are also some fundamental constants to the physical universe: Planck's constant, the speed of light, and Newton's gravitational constant. There are biological universals and constants, such as gender disposition and physiology. In the modern civilized world, we see universals around the dignity of the human being, respect for personal property, limits of the state, and the rule of law. As individuals, we also tend to find our deepest and most enduring happiness through the universals of family, vocation, friendship/community, and faith. We also find the draw we all have towards a transcendent Absolute through our groping for goodness, truth, beauty, and love in a multitude of ways. Maybe we know implicitly that only through eternal forms, can changeable and impermanent things have significance. And therefore maybe things are not so depressingly relative after all. Why don’t we want to believe in absolutes? Because they impose demands on us; demands to say with conviction that some truths are better than others, and demands for us to live by them. It feels safer to search or play with truth, then claim any Truth. But who said God was safe? He's just fabulously Absolute.
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Most consider Joe Jackson's best work to be his most popular albums, Look Sharp and Night and Day. I tend to prefer his more obscure work, and consider Night and Day II (a beautiful piece of work), Big World (wonderfully poignant and intense), and Blaze of Glory (epic) to be my favorites.
We sometimes appear stuck between an existential catch phrase of “be yourself” and a Buddhist-like notion that “there is no-self.” There is a lot of confusion with both concepts. The relative aspect of self is just a self-organizing narrative that allows us to function in the world. Also, often known as the egoic-self, where there can be healthier and less-healthier forms of this. The existentialists would take this one step further by claiming to break the grip of the past by aligning with the choices we make going forward. But this version of self is just replacing one story about oneself with maybe a better story. But our locus of identity is still mostly organized around concepts of our self-conscious doer, albeit with a sense of more autonomy than disposition. Going a step further, the not-self teaching (anattā/anātman) in Buddhism would claim all concepts about the self are false and that this can be Realized by the practices of emptiness. But there are some misunderstandings here also, as the original teachings did not claim there was no self but where the self was-not. The Buddha never denied a self, but that there was no self to be found in the five aggregates: namely translated as corporeality, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and individual consciousness. Yet, ātman remains. The ātman was not impermanent, unlike the aggregates (skandhas) which comprised of a false self. Still, ātman is seen as universal, which leaves little to room for the particularities around individuality. It would seem to me even Self-Realized persons still act as persons, with particular dispositions, inclinations, and personalities. These are the constraints and gifts that make us human, even as a liberated one. So Buddhism does not definitively speak of finding the true self, but only losing the false one. By contrast, Christianity revolves around the notion of the Person which is derived from the doctrine of the Trinity. As a Person, we are substance-in-relation. The First relation is vertical in sharing in the Infinite. We are receptive of “one’s own existence from a Source that remains ever transcendent.” “Being in a state of grace is the Christian version of what the Buddhist calls the primordial state or essence of mind. It is not passive in the sense of being merely inert, but actively receptive to whatever comes from the Infinite.” We are not just Consciousness, but we possess consciousness. Therefore, we possess an “inner unity that transcends the flux into which Buddhism would dissolve us—a flux of physical and psychical elements, of individual moments in time generated one after another by karma.” The Second relation is horizontal in sharing with others in the world. This makes this inner unity paradoxical. Our true center is not just in ourselves, but also outside ourselves. We exist in relationship to others. Therefore, we can’t find our true self just by introspection. Again, we are substance-in-relation! If we look to the image of the cross, we can symbolically find a paradoxical and Trinitarian true self at its center. This center contains the interaction of these inner and outer modes of being where God, soul, and world are always finely mingled, and in ways which are unique to the individual. This center is universal and particular, dynamic and essential, and is the only true self that can go forward Self’ing as God's mediator in the world.
“You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.” (Ephesians 4:22–4) (Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from the excellent book The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity by Stratford Caldecott.)
Last year when I was taking a mini-course on St. Aquinas, I mentioned to the instructor that I had also been influenced by some process theologians, when he immediately noted I need to read God and Intelligence by Bishop Fulton Sheen. He said the Bishop takes them on tactfully, and comes to the defense of Aquinas’ cogent thoroughness on the matter. (I tackled similar ‘evolutionary spiritual’ themes before, here and here.) I put the book on the back burner, until such a time I knew I would be able to dive in. In the meantime, I got to watch some videos of Bishop Sheen’s performances on his prime-time show in the 1950’s. Imagine, a Bishop pontificating on prime time television about Christianity, yet he certainly had the polish for the fledgling platform! In regards to this excellent book, I came to see why the instructor pointed me here. Bishop Sheen brings out a fresh perspective of Aquinas from the point of view of the modern thinker. While the modern thinker is all about progress, “Progress is necessarily conservative. To perfect we must conserve the gains of the past.” The question is what is conserved in progress? It would seem that for real progress to occur, growth would have to be organic. Yet, “growth of modern philosophy is not organic. It grows not from within like a living organism, but from without like a crystal. It grows on contradictions. Swinging always between the two extremes, it passes precipitately from one extreme to the other.” This sort of juxtaposition of ideas does little to offer coherency since there are no universals prior to singulars. Sheen notes, “The Scholastic principle of progress and continuity is metaphysical, not biological. It applies to all the kingdoms of the universe, and with greater applicability and logic than any of the modern applications. The continuity and fluidity of the universe may be viewed either statically or dynamically. Statically, the continuity is revealed in the unfolding of the principle: a higher nature in its lowest perfection touches a lower nature in its highest perfection. Dynamically, the same conclusion is revealed in the application of the principle, the more perfect the nature, the less the movement.” The fact that we can know with confidence at all, means that knowing is grounded in a Higher intelligibility. “Knowledge is not a push from below, but a gift from above.” So when we Reason, we are progressing from a conserved principle to a revealed conclusion. But somewhere along the line, we stopped submitting ourselves to the First Principle. God became equivalent to progress, and man started to identify what is perfect with what is imperfect. Sheen says,
“Until the fifteenth century, human nature was considered perfectible by a gratuitous gift of God. Grace was not the destruction of nature; it was its perfection. From that time began a war against all extrinsic authority, either in the form of the church as with Luther, or of the speculative intelligence as with Kant, or of government as with Rousseau. The biological hypothesis of evolution was taken over, and was held by many to imply that for the perfectibility of human nature by a gift of God was substituted perfectibility through the natural laws of progress and becoming. In other words, until the fifteenth century, nature and grace were regarded as superposed, one being the perfection of the other. Then came the new notion, one of juxtaposition of nature and grace.”
Where there was once a beautiful continuity and progress of all orders, e.g. between metaphysics, reason, revelation, theology, cosmology, etc, all now got reduced down to biological continuity. And if there was a God, He now got reduced from an object of knowledge to an object of experience (where there were no principles to render those experiences intelligible). While biological evolution explains the how or the process (and it doesn’t even do that well; see here); it will never explain the origin of nature. Modern philosophy reconciles this by making the nature of God consist in evolution. But a God that is too bound up in the cosmos with becoming, can be of no service to it. He is brought to move as an imperfection to possess more perfection with man. But the “imperfect is intelligible only in virtue of the perfect. To reverse this process is to bring chaos into philosophy.” “The whole was no more than a deification of man, “who will have no other gods but me;” and a humanization of the Divine. The Absolutist denied morality to God to save His absoluteness; the Pragmatist denied absoluteness to save His morality; and the biological philosopher makes the supreme renunciation: He gives up God to save man.” Man had succeeded in making God a silent partner — and in his man-made image and likeness.
These days have been bearing witness to the annihilation of my expectations of this life. It has many moments where the reflection is that of a suffering fool. But the fool can have the last laugh if he stays obedient to Heaven. I rarely find dreams worth a mention due to their whimsical nature. But I did have a recent dream where I had a sweet encounter with my estranged father. After he swung a few unsuccessful shots at me, I asked gently “what are you doing?” At that moment he embraced me (and metaphorically my brokenness). It had a vividness to it that gave me lasting comfort. I have not acted on it, but it has been passively activating me. I feel suffering as a vehicle with meaning, where my being available to it conveys how much joy can be available for me. If I pay attention to what is actually at hand (rather than what I imagine to be at hand) and then bless it, It blesses me. My forgiveness to myself is what undivides me. I'm done striving for mountain tops. I prefer the rock bottom, but not in a masochistic sort of way. I recently heard one of St. Augustine's definitions for sin translates into “caved in around myself.” Interiorly, this is like the mind curled around itself, its self-image, the pre-occupations of the narcissistic discursive self. Exteriorly, this no better expressed than our smartphone addiction. Just consider how our postures exudes the image of the body curled around and isolated by the device. We are walking, thinking sinners! But if we choose to place our attention away from all this distraction and gently go into our pain, we can sense a core wound waiting to be healed. We don't need to understand or process it, just be with it. Once truly seen, our brokenness is embraced into the whole while ever new Life breathes through us.
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My latest non-dual teacher crush is Jon Bernie; for no other reason than I like his presence and skillfulness. When it comes to Truth and Method, sometimes they don't always align in the way we would prefer. So I'm not necessarily on the non-dual bandwagon, as I am on the path to being divinely human. Jon Bernie seems to embody that in a way that resonates with me.
