Beholding the Real

A train of thought too long for a note. . .

"Let me attempt to convey what an unspeakably joyful revelation it is that in place of “raw masses wandering to no purpose” we find ourselves actually in a world replete with sound and color and a host of other sensible qualities: the very world artists have painted and poets have sung, which turns out not to be a fantasy—a mere res cogitans—but an authentic ambience, inhabited by beings we can perceive, communicate with, and love." The Vertical Ascent: From Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos and Beyond by Dr. Wolfgang Smith.

My mind has been reeling, blown into a thousand pieces, my eyes opened to deeper truths! I just finished reading this book by physicist, mathematician, and philosopher Dr. Wolfgang Smith (where has this guy been?!) basically in one sitting yesterday because I just couldn't stop! In a matter of 24 hours my perspective has shifted in what I can only describe as right side up! For that is how Modern Man has always perceived the world: upside down - and having gone down that rabbit hole, the deeper you go the more you realize just how f---ed our Western modern world is! It's screwed. The Enlightenment gave us liberty but at what cost? The cost was too high! Not that much can be done about it now other than to give all these things up one by one and return to some of the truths that all of humanity once knew naturally.

There is a lot that can be said and what I would want to say, but for now having studied modern physics for years, even reading theories from those who would be considered on the fringes of science, this man presents the most salient and obvious answer, and it was staring us in the face THE WHOLE TIME. Quite literally. Namely that what we SEE and subsequently PERCEIVE is REAL. It is so simple, naïve even, almost too obvious to comprehend right away, but if you think about it, the ontological implications of it, it radically breaks every artifice of modern invention and then the world suddenly becomes TRULY opened to you!

I realized today that this is something my three year old nephew already knows innately! All children do. When my nephew asks me for the upteenth time that day, “What is that?” and I answer him (“Rock. Tree. Bird. Stone.”) he knows something in that moment not even all the great scientists of our time know, something even Einstein himself did not know! I don’t say this as a quaint, cutesy hyperbole but as a statement of obvious fact. Of course my nephew doesn’t know what he knows, only the knowing, but it seems that not only did we lose the epistemological knowledge of knowing, but the very ability of knowing ITSELF right along with it! (For the time, of course, that we still operate within post-Enlightenment thought. We never actually lose this ability and, in fact, this ability to still truly know is why Modern Man suffers so much through cognitive dissonance. . .) Modern Man has not only made himself more ignorant than a child, he has made himself the lowest, basest, and most pitiful of creatures! (Why do we hate ourselves so much??)

There are literally SO many things falling into place for me and SO many questions that I have! One of them being - why did we ever accept this way of life in the first place?? What was so freak’in great about it that lured us away from what we already knew to be true? This REAL reality is precisely what I have longed for all my life since I could remember - and turns out I WAS LIVING IN IT! As Dr. Wolfgang Smith mentions poets and artists have shown us the world the whole time, and as an artist myself it is what I was striving towards in my own creativity! “Deep calls to deep. . .”

Now I am just pissed. WHO in their RIGHT MIND thought it was a GOOD IDEA to obliterate the sanctity of the Real?! Seriously! I am baffled! I mean I get darkened minds and all, but what was so BAD about the ancient world that everyone said, “Yeah, let’s screw this up and make it a world of meaninglessness!” I understand that this worldview didn’t happen all at once, but was a gradual process through a string of philosophical thought, scientific “progress”, and political events, but this is just what is echoing in my mind: Why why why?? Why would someone want a meaningless/nonexistent world? Why do we want to be glorified, crude manifestations of slop and matter? I don’t understand. I really don’t. It distresses me.

But I was already in the process of my perspective shifting radically through my studies of symbolism, archetype, and astrology, and as a Christian, Christ is obviously central, pivotal, and ultimate to all of this, which I hope to elaborate more on in time, but reading this book was the last push I needed, and now I have come out of Wonderland (it had its moments to be sure!) and am back in the real world, which is and promises to be more wondrous than even the mind of Man could ever imagine!

“. . . as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” | 2 Corinthians 4:1.