I believe there is much to be said as to how entropy and sin share a relationship. If physical entropy is the degradation of matter and energy from order to disorder, sin is a form of spiritual entropy where our soul can easily move from a state of sacred relationship to profane alienation. This is not to be dismissed by any of us.
I've been reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt, and what's unsettling about today's “woke” movement is how divorced it is from nuance. Its become an all or nothing dichotomous orientation. Every group is seen as an object of privilege or oppression, and every uncomfortable emotion is used a basis for argument. There is no ontological center for one's mode of existence. So we are left with a call-out culture of scapegoating those who offend us, when the real sacrifice needs to come from within.
When Solzhenitsyn stated “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” he was conveying there are no purely good or evil people. After his arrest and being sent to a gulag for being a Stalin dissident, he realized he could just as easily been an executioner for the state rather than the condemned man who could have been executed. He was eventually released and exiled, and made the point in his writings and life to not fall prey to being self-righteous.
But the self-sacrifice (or repentance) of our self-image in place of our judgement of others is not always easy, and it requires constant vigilance.
The Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange said, “In the way of God, he who makes no progress loses ground.” We are never arrived, but always arriving; otherwise we are distancing ourselves. There are no plateaus.
I often find even in my workouts I am never truly maintaining. My body is always going through changes where some weeks I make gains, and other periods I need to adjust to setbacks. Routines that worked well a few years ago, don't work so well today. I'm constantly responding to injuries, recovery time, and my energy level.
But this doesn't necessarily mean I'm losing ground, as there are ways to change my relationship to these circumstances. I can change my relationship to my expectations. It doesn't mean I have to achieve the physicality of my past. It can be more about slight functional improvements, slowing down the aging process, or the post-workout satisfaction I have. And if I'm injured, I may need to learn patience and acceptance. The key is ground does not have to be lost as long as my motivation (or faith) remains steadfast throughout these changes.
The same could be said in regards to developing soul strength. While entropy is a function of our physical universe (and our aging bodies), there is also an interior neg-entropy impulse that can guide our souls to a deeper ordering. Even if we feel progress is not being made, we are pulled forward as long as we keep the faith. We can eventually find that our relationship to life's obstacles can be transforming.
We are always moving, but which way? We can abide forward, or we don't. Stasis is not an option.
The pursuit of Truth is one of the core inquiries for philosophers, metaphysicians, theologians, physicists, biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and Joe Rogan on mushrooms. Then there are those who believe Truth is feeling, which in the end just morphs to Truth is power, which is not Truth at all but closer to the will of mobs and despots. Beyond that, there’s not much I can add that hasn’t already has been said in regards to Truth, except that it’s the Truth to say in my way.
I was at a philosophy meetup a few weeks back, and the fellow I was having a conversation with seemed to be on another plane of reality. He couldn’t get past the fact Truth or even the idea of seeking it was some sort of machination of the brain. I couldn’t get anywhere with him because our assumptions were so different. And even if I could make my premises explicit, he just saw that as another code-error of the brain. So basically he explained me and himself away, and in the end it didn’t matter that we were there. I could have just as well stayed home and watched Netflix.
I get it that some consider life to be a closed system. It’s a sad disposition to be in, but most do live in an ordinary consciousness with a worldview that is less than ordinary. And while we can find out or know all kinds of facts about anything or everything, we may never discover what anything or everything is. So while we can be ignorant about a lot of things, the real issue is the fundamental ignorance of the totality.
Bob offered up a great aphorism recently: “Things are only knowable in part because they are unknowable in full.” The mind can know things, but it can’t KNOW the THING. The only reason the mind can know things, is that the THING that it can't know is KNOWING itself. And since KNOWING is infinite, the THING (which is not a thing) is unknowable by a finite mind.
Got that?! And while we can taste the THING, we will never swallow it whole!
Even experientialists are wrong to believe they can nail it down. Yes, some of us have sat on zafus and taken our ayahuasca to get a glimpse of the THING, but there’s still something amiss with this approach. Frank Merrell-Wolff says, “The Pragmatists are right in asserting that formal knowledge is not enough to determine effective or final Truth, but they are wrong in asserting that such Truth, or the knowledge of it, must depend upon experience. On the other hand, the rational Idealists are right in maintaining the effective Truth must be absolute and, therefore cannot be derived from experience, which of necessity must be finite. But they are wrong in so far as they claim to be able to establish this Truth by formal demonstration alone. The effective establishment of this Truth requires ‘Knowledge through Identity,’ i.e. a direct Recognition on the level of Infinity, which is never attainable by any expansion of experience alone.”
And since we are all individuals with differences, “every expression is at best but a facet reflecting the Truth as near as may be.”
As such, we can’t get absolute Truth in a relative world. We are mediators to Truth, but never the possessors of it.
The subject-object manifold that we fall under through ordinary consciousness is the source of our estrangement from Source. We don't even consider how insidious this contracted condition is, because we are so good at buffering our pain with constant distraction rather than being in a relationship with the Real.
“Conditional existence DOES hurt---and not just when it is especially hurting. It hurts ALL the time!” (Adi Da).
(Please note I am not endorsing Adi Da. I’m well aware of the controversies surrounding him, but I do believe a couple of his earlier books were pretty good at refining the esoteric.)
In the preface of The Method of the Siddhas, the author says “Meditation and esoteric practices do not lead to love, happiness, freedom, and the Sacrifice that can be called God-Realization. Rather, exactly the reverse is true — only active sacrifice, God-Communion in the moment, the life of love, happiness, and freedom in every ordinary action, is the ground for real spiritual practice and Realization.”
And I believe that’s a central point: the method is our motivation to be with God at all times. Note: be with God, not just seek Him.
Carl McColman says, “For herein is a paradox: contemplation means we seek the God who has already found us, but our longing will, at least on this side of eternity, never be fully satisfied.”
Here again, the sages say there is nothing that a man can do to save himself, to become God Realized. If we approach Truth from the point of view of the search, it will always evade us.
In a Christ-like manner, we must sacrifice of our search, striving, and effort. We can only take the motivated posture to inhabit our intimacy with God.
We can set the conditions for this sacrifice, also known as self-emptying or kenosis, but it is not done by us. McColman adds,
“In other words, if you wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I will empty myself today,’ even if you spend the day performing very worthy and loving actions designed to foster your humility or lessen your dualistic mind or sense of self-importance, in truth you will still in some way miss the kenotic mark, because all of your actions will still carry the faint imprint of self-directed, self-important striving. I will humble myself—see where the emphasis is placed? ‘It's all about me’ is the best way to distract yourself from the kenotic call. … A much more useful approach would be to regard kenosis as an antidote to the lust for experience.”
It reminds me of the punchline to the joke where the Rabbi observes the self-flagellation of a poor man, and then elbows a banker and whispers “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”
Our progress or ascent toward God may be more like a decent or revealing of God to us. We just got to get out of the way.
