Eyes Of You And Me—Mirrored In the Eye Of God

What We Have Here Is A Spinoza Monism With A Mobius Twist—God
Existing Inside Out

In the process of writing this paper I have deliberately refrained from using religious/spiritual language to describe freedom's synchronic axis. And, indeed, I suppose one of the beauties of the synchronic axis of freedom is that one does not have to take the "leap of faith" to a more spiritual interpretation of freedom (the humanism of James or Dewey will do just fine here). But, the fact remains that my description of freedom is based on two logical primitives, first, the logic that something must “first be" before it can be negated, i.e., the principle behind Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum,” and second, the logic that follows from a double negative—not, not P = P. Self-consciousness, or discontinuity occurring in continuity (while occurring in continuity occurring in discontinuity—the material world), is the affect of the first logical primitive while God/Wholeness/Freedom/Affirmative Ideal is the affect of the second logical primitive. “Creation” begins in the structural primitive of ~~b (not, not being), which, in turn, becomes alive in ~bb (death/life), which, in turn, becomes self-consciousness in b~b~bb. The b~b~bb structure (Piaget's functional center) is responsible for questioning, creativity, analysis, calculations, i.e., all the “constructive structuring that births language, myth, science, ethics/morality/civilization.”

Synchronic structure’s Wholeness is implied; that is, by virtue of synchronic structure, Wholeness remains outside of experience/physical event, i.e., is not part of creation. However, it only takes a small “leap of faith” to conclude that God exists in this affirmed indeterminate Wholeness, exists in this "ground of being," exists in the "affirmative ideal" that is at the center of all creation—the creation that permits the freedom to ask the question: Does God Exit? God and freedom, from this point of view, are the same thing, however, operationally speaking, also from this point of view, God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all- present (knowledge, power, and temporality being a product of the synchronic structure that implies Wholeness/God). What we have here, ultimately, is a Spinoza monism with a Mobius twist, a God simultaneously existing inside out. In this Mobius twist we find the final answer to the questions, "Who participates?" and "What is participated in?" In the immediately grasped indeterminate, all-embracing oneness of God's freedom lies the source of the knower and consequently the knower's freedom. F. S. Northrop tells us how wondrously close we are to God when he says:

"Now it is precisely this ineffable, emotional, moving quale that constitutes what is meant by spirit and the spiritual. Thus in order to do justice to the spiritual nature of human beings and of all things it is not necessary to have recourse to idle speculations, by means of which one tries to pierce through the glass beyond which we now see darkly, to supposedly unaesthetic material substances behind, or into some unreachable and unknowable realm where mental substances are supposed to be. On the contrary, the spiritual, the ineffable, the emotionally moving, the aesthetically vivid — the stuff that dreams and sunsets and the fragrance of flowers are made of — is the immediate, purely factual portion of human nature and the nature of all things. This is the portion of human knowledge that can be known without recourse to inference and speculative hypotheses and deductive logic, and epistemic correlations and rigorously controlled experiments. This we have and are in ourselves and in all things, prior to all theory, before all speculation, with immediacy and hence with absolute certainty." [F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, 1946, p.462]


In other words, the same intuitive sensitivity and religiously felt compassion that you and I experience (that in one form or another all nature's creature’s experience) is also experienced by God. Reciprocal movement, the same reciprocal movement that brings into existence language, myth, science, ethics/morality and civilization, also brings our emotional life to God. When I experience love, caring, happiness and reverence, so too God! It’s a two way street—a two sided reality that we share with Divinity. The telling factor behind this whole process comes with the knowledge that the "I" of God and the "I" of you and me are one in the same. Here I am reminded of the penetrating words of the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart who is reported to have said, "The eye in which I see God and the eye in which God sees me are one and the same." Again, the liberation of God's non-being becomes God's immanence in the here and now while, at the same time, there exists an implied transcendent God; that said, divine immanence is extremely important to you and me because it is, in addition to being Divine, the reality—of the good, the bad, and the ugly/nauseating.