Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 5:02 am
No thanks. You're not sincere, so far as I can see...and not interesting...so I won't be bothering.
I have the sense at times that we here are always right on the edge of *meaningful realizations* about the essences of what we talk about, but there is no one who can resolve the discordancy. So, the constant here is always a *bickering disagreement*. Instead of being, say,
dismayed by that, my strategy is to turn
that into a focus.
So, when I read what Immanuel wrote I am puzzled on one side, but then (in a manner of speaking) distressed that Immanuel is incapable of communicating the central point that (he says) is so utterly vital. Recently Iambiguous has expressed, certainly not insincerely, that he would wish he could resolve the central discordancy of his life (that is my interpretation but it seems about right). That is, he wishes he could convince himself of the truthful validity of the central Christian admonition -- but no one can bring forth the *proof* that he needs. So, to all appearances he remains in a weird state of limbo. He can neither advance nor can he retreat, can't go forward but can't go backward, either.
In order to have *success* here, among those who cannot really even conceive of the situation in which they find themselves; that is, in a conceptual limbo in which the individual is incapable of actually understanding what happened to him -- what has happened over a number of centuries in relation to how the *world* and *being* were once perceived -- and seems, to all appearances, to flounder in a cloudy state of non-knowing with next to no grasp of the causal processes that have stripped him of awareness. In order to have success one must remain *above the fray* and always try to see the situation from a height.
So what I see is 1) a man who (not insincerely) asks for a definite, believable answer; but b) another man who is absolutely incapable of supplying it, even though he says he represents the Lord Jesus Christ and, he suggests, can guide that one who listens to *drink* from the Eternal Spring and thus be *saved*.
It is in relation to this nearly absurd conundrum that I say that both Immanuel and Iambiguous are men who are in an essential sense stuck in the same problem. Both of them are men who have been *extruded* from a sort of
intellectual compression device here on this far side of postmodernism. To describe what has happened, and what the result is, is my object, yet I am simply not very good at it. Yet I start with the assertion that they are both *realists*. What that means, or seems to mean, is that they both have *afflicted imaginations*. If I refer to *imagination* I am referring to notions and concepts more proper to the 17th century. How can this be explained?
Let me try to explain it like this: If Iambiguous did not have an
afflicted imagination, he might be capable of crossing over the bridge that separates his soul from a confiable realization and the gaining of an inner territory of certainty in relation to the spiritual problem that consumes him. Or, put more accurate, in which he spins his wheels as in a mud-pit. The imagination (here I refer to Coleridge's sense of that word) would participate in the construction of the *bridge* that would carry him from a zone of insecurity and ignorance, to one of greater security and knowledge (gnosis).
But the
vehicle needed -- the word *imagination* is a stand-in for a faculty that requires an in-depth explanation -- is dysfunctional. You could compare it to a
vehicle or to
wings or even to
feet.
So, this afflicted imagination, which is as I say a historical result, can only sit within a dreary mud puddle and bray about how terrible the mud puddle is, how restrictive, how defeating, how painful in fact -- and in this situation he will flounder until Death overtakes him and finally extinguishes him. True, this is a paraphrase, but he has basically said as much.
Now, what does *imagination* mean here? Again we'd have to return to the intellectual struggles of the 17th century in order to understand the concept. But a notion of *imagination* and *imaginative faculty* depends on a concept of an
active agent within the soul of man that both responds to the same agent in the surrounding world, but is also a moulder and creator of, let me say, imaginative vessels. Now here, most who write on this forum will take that to mean an unreal vessel, something invented, and as such something illusory. You see? That is how we all see those things that I might refer to as *spiritual*. If they were at one time vessels they are now collapsed, dysfunctional contraptions that rot on a field of assumed meaninglessness. If a *vessel* is taken as a means by which *meaning* is grasped, appreciated, and allowed to be an active agent in the life of man, now there are no *vessels* that can life one anywhere at all.
What is curious here is that Immanuel Can declares that he is the emissary of the Real Truth, the transforming Reality, of a Spirit that is just that vessel. Or that which stimulates that part of man in which the *spark* (of the divine) is said to reside. But here's the thing: He is absolutely incapable of communicating any of that because of his own Afflicted Condition. Whatever the mystery is or might be is no mystery at all in Immanuel's hands, but rather something horrifyingly dreary and really quite dead.
So the dead talk to the dead. Or rather they simply bicker unendingly in a deadened state -- and yet it
sustains them somehow! It is not quite a full death but rather a lingering morbidity.
Now I admit that there are many here, most really, who cannot accept the notion of a *divine spark* or any notion of a *soul* that exists in man. I believe I can understand why they have this view. Again, it was all asserted and explained centuries earlier by men of powerful intellectual capability. The world *concocted* by the imaginative faculty is in no sense *real* ... and so the entire notion is dismissed. And what results? We are, man is, and all life is,
reduced to mechanics. We conceive of ourselves as machines and we become machine-like. And then we are convinced that this is all we are and indeed all we can be. The imaginative vessel is grounded and, like Iambiguous, a rather dreary *life* is carried on within an imprisoning mud puddle, or a type of
structure that one constructs oneself or in ay case
fortifies.
