Logic 101
Back to the Future - the Reenchantment of the World
There was a time when the modern scientific cosmology was emerging that it was capable of striking terror into the hearts of thoughtful people. The idea that life was an accident in a meaningless universe, and that the earth was a barely a speck of dust lost in the immensities of space and time, is anything but a cozy idea. But we seem to have gotten used to it, and it is difficult for us now to recall that initial terror.
Now, in the face of another disrupting change of world views, we may once again experience the terror of the unknown, but let us remind oursleves that life will go on, albeit in forms and contexts that we might not readily recognize.
Just as we were getting used to the idea of being left alone in the universe to our own devices, we awaken from our slumber of materialism to a world that is vastly more mysterious and complex than science was leading us to believe. Moreover it is a world haunted by myriad, barely concealed intelligences with unknown designs on our own existence.
Science would have us take a lot of things for granted, but everything is up for grabs when we wake up to the fact that everything is much more like a dream world than it is like an absolute object. But, of course, nothing about the world will change unless we change our minds. Changing our minds will have to be our first order of business.
It is fair to ask how we can know what is the true nature of reality. Immaterialism will win the metaphysical contest largely be default. The incoherence of materialism and dualism will make those views relatively unacceptable. There is a coherence to materialism, but it is a coherence that is abstract and theoretical that can hardly be sustained outside the lecture hall. Its conceptual rigidity make is vulnerable to even the slightest incursions of what may be wild or weird in the world.
The original novelty and shock value of materialism has long since worn off. Our minds now easily wander past its very narrow confines. Ironically it is the psychological and even spiritual allures of virtual reality and cyberspace that can be seen as the last hurrah of materialism. Technology has sewn the seeds of its own transcendence, just as it was destined to do.
It is not the abstract proofs which will carry the day. At the end of the day, it is our spirits that will lead us to our next challenges, guide us to our next high frontiers.
No!! Rationality begins and ends with our own minds. If the world is to be rational, then it must be of, for and by ourselves and other spiritual beings of similar nature. This is our only guarantee that there is an ultimate, comprehensible truth. At this point, one can easily hear the snickering from the cynics in the back benches. How long have we to wait for the final revelation, they might wonder. Only a few seconds....
The ultimate truth can only be love, what else could possibly make any sense. If in the final exam for Logic 101 or for any other course, you dare to write just that one word, you will get an A+, guaranteed. Everything else is fear, loathing and cynicism.
How can I know this? How can I believe it? There is nothing else that is worth believing, and there really is nothing else to believe except a lot of mental abstractions. There is a hierarchy of things, emotions and ideas, and all you have to do is stop to reflect for a few moments to realize what must lie at the top of that heap. There really is no middle ground. We can choose love or we can choose the void.
A world composed of atomic stuff in the void can, sometimes, make a lot of sense until we realize that we are not compelled to believe it. We can be sane and not believe in atomic physics, although there are many pressures to sustain the modernist, naive realist consensus. But these pressures continue to diminish, mainly from boredom from within that regimen.
If logic cannot be posited in the atoms or the void, then the only other place for it is in our minds. Our minds are then micrcosms reflecting the cosmic spirit. We are sparks off of that block. This is beginning and end of all knowledge, of gnosis.
One might suppose that there could be something other, something out there radically alien to anything we can know or imagine. What is to prevent this something from crahing into us and upsetting our cozy little cosmos.
Well, in some sense, that alien 'asteroid' is what the eschaton is, relative to our present slumber of materialism. It is our wakeup call. But it is not alien. It serves only to waken us to the true and deeper nature of ourselves and the world. It is we who have become the aliens. We have become alienated from our true selves and from the truth of the world.
The rest of this cosmology is to be taken in the light of the eschaton waking us to the truth that has been with us from the beginning. You know it when you feel it. You feel it when you see it. To participate in truth, all you have to do is be a little more reflective, a little less grasping of all those half truths that do not finally amount to anything but a big abstraction.
We are the logic, we are the LOGOS of this world. It is our story to tell, no one else's.