(Words of Petey in red.)
Man needs to climb the Cosmic Mountain in order to give his life meaning.
Which one?
There's only one, but the modern world gives human beings a wide array of counterfeit ones, which is why climbing them does nothing to relieve the emptiness, and often exacerbates it.
Concur. My son is set to finish climbing one of those phony mountains called "high school" in a few months, but he already knows it means nothing, and no, he's not cynical, rather, the opposite. But talk about the Special Olympus! If literally anyone can climb it, it may be a sign that you're standing on a not-so-great plain.
I remember back when I was contending with the Matrix, I wanted to have a college degree -- the subject didn't matter -- only because I was happy working in the supermarket, but didn't want people thinking I was so stupid that I had no option but to work there. I never thought of it as an accomplishment. It was all about status -- as it still is -- only I was aware of it.
Wasn't it the same with grad school?
Yes, I wanted to be like the Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces, who has a blue collar existence working in the oil fields but was a musical prodigy who could have presumably chosen to be a concert pianist. Except in reverse, in that I had no gift or accomplishment or virtuoso background to "give up." Rather, I had to acquire one in order to throw it away.
Come to think if it, my current life isn't too different. Even my son commented that taking all the time and trouble to become a clinical psychologist isn't the sort of thing one simply abandons at the first opportunity: eight years of grad school, 3,000 hours of supervised internship, passing the licensing exam, and numerous other hoops. Now, that was a mountain. But who cares. I'd rather sit in the backyard and read mystical poetry.
I'm going to be sick. You think you're so cool! You remind me of an insecure high school kid who refuses to try out for the team so he can boast about how great he could have been. You're worse than Uncle Rico!
Is that what this is?
That's what I think. Look at you, always working on the Ultimate Book you'll never actually finish. After all, it's the Ultimate Book! You're too cool to write a normal book, one that people might read. Same with the old blog -- you think that repelling readers is a measure of success! Well, congratulations -- you have three readers, assuming you even read yourself.
Over the line, Petey! I thought we were in this together.
We are, but let's get back to the Cosmic Mountain, because the Chinaman is not the issue. How exactly are you climbing it? I'm only a sherpa. I can't climb it for you.
Well, I made some progress yesterday, or rather, some progress was made while I was there.
Meaning what?
Meaning that the whole problem is one of structure or organization, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. You can't presume to write about Everything without Something to hang it on.
Go on.
Well, yesterday, in three different places, the same idea appeared, and I think this idea goes to the structure. That was such a coincidence, I assumed you were behind it.
It's possible.
First, this passage from a lecture by Bernard Lonergan:
If you are seeking certain knowledge of things through their causes, you start from the thing, and you work to the discovery of the causes. When you have the causes, you want to check; so you work back from the causes until you can construct things out of them. The scholastics called the first part of this movement resolution into the causes, analysis. The second part of the movement was synthesis.
So the Cosmic Mountain is a "movement of the things to the causes, and then the causes back to the things."
The old vertical circle. That really preoccupies you, doesn't it?
Sure does. I feel like the guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- yesterday I made a Cosmic Mountain out of potatoes.
No, really. Well, not potatoes, but on a huge piece of cardboard. When my wife has a minute, I'll show you a photo. I don't know how to work a digital camera.
Of course. You're too cool for that.
Anyway, this second quote is from The Irreducibility of the Human Person, in which the author writes of how this "ultimate structure" is revealed to us in the Mass, in which "we receive gifts only to offer them back to God." I'll bet one in a hundred communicants realize that this is what's going on, this recirculation of metacosmic energies.
The vertical open system.
Precisely. After all, if it doesn't exist, then you're not here speaking to me.
You said there was a third passage, Let's see if you were paying attention.
the cosmogonic movement is not merely centrifugal, it becomes centripetal in the final analysis, which is to say that it is circular; the circle of Maya closes in the heart of the deified man (Schuon).
That was Sunday. What about yesterday?
Ratzinger, speaking of the Mass, writes of "the cosmos as a process of ascent," with the Eucharist providing "the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on."
So the Mass is a participation in the Great Vertical Circle?
Stop pretending you don't know that.
