Sacred Symbology part 1: Our Hidden Problem: A Prophetic Think Tank

Sacred Symbology: Our Hidden Problem

We are all looking for answers to those most important questions, and if we think we already have them we still have to honestly examine them to make sure we are not deceived. Those answers, no matter what we believe, are still in an important sense hidden from us, in that belief assumes no direct empirical knowledge, but inferred knowledge.  We can disagree about whether there is a God or not, or then whether that God has made such answers knowable. But we can’t disagree if we love truth in any sense, that the business of seeking after these answers to these questions is the highest possible charge and definition conceivable of human beings, and a charge that we may or may not be living up to.

If these answers and our a correct view of our righteousness in the handling of knowledge are flying under the radar screen of our normal consciousness in some way then our desire for the truth and our certainty that answers are possible and certain, and would benefit us, should propel us first to examine our cognitive methods of detecting it.

If this is to be done, there are some basic assumptions that have to be held. If we are looking for ultimate truth, we have to have an ultimate assumption about what is most quintessentially “moral” and “hidden,” What we find would have to become our means and object of a moral faith, because faith is by partly by definition a lack of complete knowledge because it is not accessible by normal means and under the limitations of consciousness, and it is an act of the greatest conceivable honesty or dishonesty. The object of a moral faith is partially “hidden,” and if we have a problem finding it when we have the means then so we must assume what is also hidden to us is the identification of a fundamental problem in our faith that it exists and it will be found.

First and foremost, ultimate answers, distinct to the realm of religion, since they are about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves and beyond, are ultimately the crucial and “hidden” ones.  Where do we start to look? Perhaps its to start in a very simple assumption in speaking about the great questions of existence.

Since to the extent that these ultimate answers are about ourselves and our world, we should at least assume that they are also immanent and within reach. If they are hidden from us and hard to find, yet in reach within the world, they must then be as close at hand as the world is their carriers. But if we the seekers of these answers are at variance with them viscerally, is it any wonder why we do not find them? At variance means at war with that which is perhaps alien to us which is in the world, since if our questions are ultimate then the greatest conceivable sources of our knowledge are likely to have origins outside of space/time.

This is can be good, but only if that which is alien to us is bad for us. But what if these answers we are looking for are alien to us in a good way, and should not invite scorn but love? Our problem then in being able to finally see such a wonderful thing is then really not because we are not contrary to the world, but we are too close to it to see the treasures it holds which we fear may go contrary to us instead of for us. If we are contrary to the ultimate questions it is because of a natural antipathy to certain content in the world that is not of the world, but content that we believe one way or another that we would be better off without knowing because by its radical nature it might when it is found threaten to overthrow us.

What I am saying is that our loves and affections with respect to truth are what is hidden to us which is transcendent and available, and which drives our “hidden” problem in finding answers that are the fallen state.

But to take this a step further, might we also rightly entertain the assumption that the answers to the great spiritual questions are as close to us naturally as the degree to which they are important, like the world itself. So close that it may be said that the Truth may be in a sense said to be something at arm’s length that we were engineered to seek and in a limited sense to become.

We are bodies as well as spirits. The body is integral to us, yet not fundamental to us. If finding hidden gold is to be analogous to finding a great hidden truth, then we would never conceive of finding gold without the only means of doing so, which is our bodies, any more than we should never be able to conceive of finding a great truth without its means already built into our beings. Finding gold in this world is a certainty if one tries, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but it can be certain of its genuineness no matter the quantity or the quality that we find. Finding truth in the spirit is the same, because the spiritual realm is the domain of our spirits, and what we are trying to find is not only in that realm but is already us in a great sense, and all we need to fully join ourselves existentially to an ultimate is to first love it, no matter what it is, which is our ordained function and potential nature.

The Symbol

This is an article about symbolism, what it is, its importance, and how far it goes as a means by which we may begin to understand the furthest reaches of existence.

It is apparent that the nature of a thing controls and is the substantial part of that thing, although it is invisible under the appearance of its outer and visible representative aspect, which expresses it in sensible reality. When we look at an object, we are looking at something superficial with respect to its totality, and we get very little information about it beyond that it exists in a certain outer form, or that it behaves in a certain way outwardly.  Almost all of the balance of the total substance of that object lies underneath. This applies not only to its mass but its immaterial forces and substances that are not visible to physical instrumentation.

But even if I break a piece of matter apart, examine and identify the various parts and elements that are hidden in a rock, for example, we are looking at its hidden substance, but still only looking at more relative superficiality. If we put it under an electron microscope, we can see individual atoms and molecules, but there is still more there. What is left in the end is something that is of a non-physical nature that can’t be precisely measured or detected and understood comprehensively by physical devices.

Here we are into the mysterious world of quantum physics; of quarks and neutrinos, and the magnetic and gravitational forces that hold them together. The further down we drill the more we see something that looks more like what we commonly refer to as spiritual, something inscrutable, something that does not behave in ways expected by matter, but something underlying the entire existence of that object.  This is the same thing with which astronomers and physicists are confronted with now, trying to identify a mysterious “substance” that holds the universe together called “dark matter,” and the “weak” and “strong” forces, by which we can see its effects but are not even close to being able to see directly or fully understand.

Newton’s law of the Conservation of Mass, that matter cannot be created or destroyed but only change forms, is repudiated by Hawking’s Black Hole.  It seems that there are regions of space that operate under almost infinite gravitational forces compress matter to the point that it literally passes out of existence, or is destroyed. A law of physics that seemed so immovable that every scientist with any repute automatically prescribed, was, while they were thinking it, quite wrong.

Hawking turned to questions of much deeper existential implications when he tried to reconcile the certainty of the beginning of space/time with what must have existed before it that caused the universe to come into existence. Physicists are materialists, having already a predisposition toward only those things which have contingency, begin to theorize that there is actually no barrier between space and what came before it by the existence of “imaginary numbers.” Always making sure that no matter where their conclusions make landfall they are nowhere near the theistic side, other “scientists” have forwarded the solution to the same problem by the gratuitous theory of the multiverse, which begs the same question of what existed before all these multiverses and caused them to appear.

Of course, the natural world presents us with many mysteries about its furthermost inner, hidden nature that seem forever insoluble, but when we try to induct our way to the nature of natural things it seems only open up more mysteries when our visceral biases start to be felt autonomous, putting down any hope of hitting on a comprehensive fundamental truth about the world we can use to settle every question. This applies just as much more so to our handling of spiritual things.

We might start by wondering why the spiritual aspect of man, and the subject of spiritual knowledge itself, should be circumscribed in an even more profound way than physics does with the mundane. Why it seems so subject to changing cultures and fleeting sentiments, opinion, unattested declarations when, as physical science does with its own laws and goals, it is supposed to be oriented by certain enumerated and tested spiritual laws controlling one known and ultimate sacred object.

Do we concede that the physical sciences rightly change positively toward its own obtainable truth not by the winds of culture but by advancing observation and experimentation, but in religion only by feeling, culture, and various intra-mundane theological statements and concepts to bring it ever closer to God? Do we concede then, as many do, can that Christianity, in particular, has had a long-standing problem internally which leads it into decay, dysfunction, schism, and an advancing skepticism of its historical axioms and into destruction, because we are more impressed by the miracles of knowledge that the sciences produce than what is supposed to be our own.

I wonder if the same problem applies to the whole nature of symbolism as well, since, in my view, as will be shown, the definition of a justified person is that he is supposed to be a symbol and becoming a symbol of something exalted instead of only a being that studies the nature of symbols.

We can pretty much write off the promise of scientific inquiry to reveal everything we need to know to allow us to live in external peace and harmony, not to mention any internal kind, but this would only be due to our placing an unjustified amount of faith in things that can only show various levels of opacity of knowledge about which we are fundamentally not. We cant emulate this in a theology that is supposed to start from revelation, not pew and academy talk. If our substance is spiritual, placing us directly against the greatest spiritual answers, then the only thing that could cause us to be unaware of this close proximity would be a disassociation in some way with the what is also a natural method we use to express and receive all truth. We are in disassociation with the eternal rules of communication that counter the dysfunction and divisiveness of our souls.

The truth is hidden from us because we have hidden ourselves from our most immanent but most alien linguistic carrier, the symbol, to which we have become no longer conversant,  causing us to look in the wrong places for the symbolic meaning of our existence outside Christ.

Please see the next article in this series: Sacred Symbology part 2. Modern Origins of the Bad Symbol