Category Archives: Star

Faith space

Philosophy, Spiral, Star, Trefoil, Wheel

Normally I don’t publish this kind of disorganized mess, but today I feel compelled to reflect on what feels like a constricting world, where liberal space from others is increasing scarce.

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A person’s beliefs are not the same as that person’s faith.

Here is why I make the distinction: Beliefs are the product of innumerable choices, guided by attitudes that precede belief. The attitudes manifest primarily as our intuitions of relevance and value, and they pre-consciously influence what we are inclined to regard with interest or complacence, what we accept or question, what we embrace or push away.

Our practical responses are similarly guided. We are pre-consciously inclined to behave in particular ways to different kinds of beings and situations.

Before birth, long before we think or begin making conscious choices, a complex feedback process of perceiving, reacting, recognizing, responding has begun, and this process simultaneously produces us as people and our situation as the world we inhabit and the relationship between enworlded self and the world in which the self emerges is faith.

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The best conversations sound out harmonies and cacophonies among faiths, faiths felt to inhabit an impossibly deep, dense, vast reality — a reality which monotheists like to emphasize as one, which polytheists like to emphasize as plural, and which pluralists like emphasize as simultaneously plural and unified.

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When talking with people of other religions I often detect a shared faith, even despite divergent beliefs. They’re “coming from a good place.” Or their “hearts are in the right place.” This place is what I call faith. And the goodness and rightness seems for me to have much to do with a desire for more than what their beliefs can grasp or possess. This is what I experience as liberal, and, for me, it has less to do with what one confesses or professes, and more to do with hospitality, mobility and spaciousness of soul.

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It is not enough to be a mystic, to believe that there is more, to sense that that a beyond exists. It is necessary to desire it and want more and more of it, even though that means almost renunciation of many mystic virtues. A liberal soul does not have special divinatory or gnostic powers, or some special relationship with god that makes one immune to vulnerability, loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty or forsakenness. A liberal at heart might be a mystic turned inside out — …

Drops away into blindness

Philosophy, Star

This passage from Voegelin’s Anamnesis sparked the insight I diagram as an asterisk.

In the illuminatory dimensions of past and future, one becomes aware not of empty spaces but of the structures of a finite process between birth and death. The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process — the only process which we know “from within.” Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness. The conflict between the finiteness of the model of experience and the “infinite” character of other processes results in a number of fundamental problems. (The term “infinite” indicates already by its negativity that along with it we enter on an area transcending experience. To speak of a process as infinite is tantamount to saying that we have no experience of it “as a whole.”) One of the most interesting of these problems is that of the antinomies of infinity in Kant’s sense. We can subject the finite process to certain derivative transformations, the so-called “idealizations,” which conduce to such concepts as the infinite series or the infinite regress. When such “idealizations” are related to finite series, there result the paradoxes of set theory; when they are related to such processes as the causal nexus, there result Kant’s antinomies. The causal series cannot begin in time because we have no experience of a beginning “in time”; more precisely, one could say that because we have no experience whatsoever of a time in which something might begin — for the only time of which we do have experience is the inner experience of the illuminated dimension of consciousness, the process that drops away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness.

Two elaborations: 1) We have more “illuminated dimensions of consciousness that drop away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness” than just time. In my asterisk, I added two other dimensions.

2) I also another analogy to illumination and darkness. We may not see objects in darkness, but we do see the darkness that prevents us from seeing. In my own experience, sight and blindness is a better analogue for our experiences of finitude and infinity, because blindness conceals not only what is concealed, but the concealment itself. With blindness, we can fail to see what we look at, because when nothing is there, nothing is also missing. If we do the blind spot experiment, wherever falls in our blind spot simply dis-appears — becomes visually nothing — without any tell-tale something blotting it out — there is no visual “nothing” to see. When nothing is there, no thing is missing, as far as we can tell.

We have to wonder — or rather, it is good to wonder — that if we can’t even tell the difference between a blind spot and a seen spot, what exactly is going on in our field of vision, which seems so continuous to us? And if we extend sight to perception, and perception to consciousness, and ask the same question — the question of what happens in in the nothingness of existence? — things get weird.

When we sit in meditation, for instance, we learn how this happens constantly at all times even in our own concentrated awareness. You could say that meditation is an existential blindspot test. We cannot see it directly, and we never have to see it at all if we do not want to (for instance if we wish to imagine ourselves to be self-omniscient) but if we allow our perplexities to bloom we will see ample signs that our consciousness is as sporadic and permeated with nothingness as our visual field. I think, therefore I am? The corollary: I don’t think when I am not, in the gaps that permeate my existence.

Crap. I’m out of time. There’s new stuff here, so I’m going to go ahead and post this.