David wrote: "I don't think you do understand why I consider you to be ignorant, to be honest. But in any case, the point I was making had nothing to do with you personally. I was addressing a deep spiritual matter."
Oh, I think I do. I once suggested that we 'paraphrase' each other, a most useful exercize, like Charades! When one paraphrases another the one paraphrased (or mimicked) gets to see what the paraphraser got right and what they got wrong. If one is honest it can be wonderful learning. Good, clean fun in any case!
And you do know (I hope) that I was joshing you. I know that you were making a statement about your view of my unwise condition. I caught it in mid-air, did a switch-a-roo on it, and sent it back at you.
The interesting thing here is that we both see each other as defective and needing a corrective. See, I also think you suffer from a 'deep spiritual ailment'.
"I can perfectly understand why you like that book. He echoes your own driving ideas."
Yes, you are right. I have thought about this, myself. Am I attracted to his ideas because I am looking for a
miracle rescue so as not to face the annihilation of Value which is also, to some extent, the annihilation of 'self'?
Pye spoke of a 'terror' when one pulls away from 'the tit' to face 'reality'. And it is true that the 'modern' issue is quite precisely such an issue. One whole defensible 'structure' for organizing perception was seen to crumble (the Medieval Christian world-view)...and no other structure arose (or can arise?) to replace it. But does it
really hinge on this? I am not so sure. Any system of perception and any organization of perception is in this sense a 'temporary construct' and will eventually be superceded. It is not impossible that our present construct (system of perception) will in the future be seen as partial or even 'ignorant'. So, it is not the
system that we should pay attention, nor the specific symbols or metaphors, but to 'messages' that are brought through these things to the perceiving eye (I). That is essentially my 'endeavor': to define a path to that 'messenger'. It is really very Hermetic which is in keeping with my orientation.
But let me ask you this: How do you square the idea of valuing "religious imagination" with that of needing to go beyond the abstract and attending directly, with our phsyical bodies, to the here and now?
Well, let us take 'religious imagination' out of your quotation marks and let it stand there, naked and shivering (or is it just shy?) for a minute. I would say that you too, and Dennis too if you don't mind me saying, and everyone else who writes here, is quite involved in the use of imagination. You 'imagine' your
God-as-everything-EVERYTHING! when you mention it, recite it, refer to it. This is actually 'religious imagination' except you don't describe it as such. You lack, I suggest, the honesty to do so. We are all 'imagining' the world we live in and we see ourselves in it when we speak about it. Both as 'self-talk' and as exposition (or 'preaching', which is your angle). But what you care to do is strip away what you identify as 'phantasy'...or mythology...or that whole construct of Ptolemaic (and any other) 'falsely imagined cosmology', and you think that by doing that you are face-to-face with Reality.
And I say that I do not think this is so. You are still face-to-face with an imagined construct, hence to an 'imaginal world', and as I say you are as much in a 'novelesque' as anyone, but in your case it has certain rigorous features. It is colored with your own aesthetic. You have also pumped it full of valuation, except that it is valuation of a different order. And it is also a deliberate de-valuation. But brother, it is active and in no sense is it neutral. And in this I say it is just as much religiously driven...as religiously driven views.
But what I am interested in is standing back and examining the 'imagined universe' and perceiving, and understanding, and dealing with, meaning as it comes through. I don't quite know how to express it. If I were to say that "Meaning comes through the very structure of the Space-Time-Matter manifestation and will do so in this and any 'world' that arises", I could almost see that as a Zennish statement. Meaning, somewhere on the other side of this Reality (existence, manifestation) some other being perceives Meaning too. What if it is Part-and-Parcel of Existence? I just don't believe any one of you has the insight or the authority to make definitive statements (you with your Zennish anti-Woman trip and, say, Pye with her pandering wall-eyed French Existentialist with a Gauloise hanging on his lip, trip).
And so I return to this idea:
"The twentieth century may have its epiphanies but it is not a favorable time for the greater visions and wider circumspections. Its intellectuals are out of their depth in dealing with those dimensions of experience for which earlier epochs have found a language."
But in
returning to it (and I think you also return to it, or turn to it), I do not discover exactly what you discover.
In my own case, the issue of 'dealing with our physical bodies in the here and now' is in no sense incommensurate with communication from and through
the Messenger (a way of perceiving or the fact that we perceive---it is a special Hermetic term and one has to linger over it) and coming to terms with a symbolic meaning-language which (I assume anyway) is part-and-parcel of this and any created world, universe, dimension, manifestation.
You do just this, as we all do.