Our Dear Absurd Universe

& how can it be otherwise?

“There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light; for in the absence of this capacity, all faults are possible and none is avoidable.” - Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, pg. 223

A fig full of sweet nectar, ready to burst, releasing a resinous bead of honey.

I spoke with a friend in the autumn of 2023 about his potatoes. He’s proud of them, and he did a good job. He grows his potatoes organically and gets their Brix levels up to 13. The higher the Brix level, the sweeter the potatoes are — and the more disease- and pest-resistant they become. In his own words, “The Colorado potato beetles don’t like sweet food. They take one bite and leave.” This is where I mused, “How often do we concern ourselves with increasing the ‘Brix level’ of our souls? Parasitic beings prefer sour souls but cannot tolerate sweet souls.” He asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “You give molasses to your potatoes and kelp from the ocean to sweeten your potatoes. What do we bring of the nectar of heaven to our souls? What do we harvest from the starry sea to nourish our souls?” I went on: there may be many “organic” souls. One is simply no-spray but overgrown with weeds. The nutrient density is almost non-existent because the farmer is negligent; the plants are shaded out and cannot photosynthesize properly. Another farmer uses every chemical spray permitted by the OMRI guidelines and nukes the fields weekly. Another farmer nourishes the soil with special herbal preparations. Yet another farmer, like the man I was speaking to, uses molasses and kelp, offering directly to the plant the essence of sunlight and the salts of the sea.

If the soul is like our plants, how do we sweeten the soul? How do we enhance our “spiritual chlorophyll”?¹ Through meditation, contemplation, and selfless service, we render the soul inhospitable to parasitic habits. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “from sacrifice arises rain.”² In the Chumash commentary on Genesis it says, “For Hashem God had not sent rain upon the earth. He had not sent rain because there was no man to work the soil… But when Adam prayed, and rain fell….”³ In a confirmed hadith, the Prophet says, “Never do people withhold alms from their wealth but that a portion from the sky will be held back; were it not for the animals, it would never rain.”⁴ Without water plants cannot condense light. Without sacrifice, the soul cannot photosynthesize grace. We ripen from wisdom, adoration, and benevolent action: from jñāna, bhakti, and karma, though as Frithjof Schuon remarked, you have bhakti without jñāna but never jñāna without bhakti. Just as ideal potatoes do not produce themselves in the wild, so too does the soul require tending. Left to itself, Nature produces countless plants, but not necessarily nourishment. The soul is no different: it must be tended, weeded, and even burned. The spiritual life is neither works nor faith alone, but the kiss of effort and grace.

Just as ideal potatoes do not produce themselves in the wild, so too the soul.

Everything is related to everything else, but finding how everything is related has become part of my calling. Years ago, a friend had pressed upon me the analogia entis, the analogy of Being. But, given that I was in my rarefied iconoclastic stage, I could not understand a way of knowing that looks through the world as through a window. I had maintained a childhood prejudice that truth was only possible through a radical break in the order of existence: revelation — but only as an interruption. To imagine that existence itself has no light, no revelation to offer except sinfulness is to turn the abundance of life to ash.

In my Protestant family, icons were considered idolatrous — or at least ludicrous. There were almost no significant depictions of animals (or even Jesus) at our various churches. I learned that our images of God were false, and I grew to extend that iconoclasm further: our ideas of God were just as flawed. I thought I’d “arrived” at something special, but I had only recognized the threshold that is the entrance into the Cloud of Unknowing. The intellect cannot pass through the abyss, but a higher spiritual function, spiritual intuition, can. But for a long time, I remained entrenched in the idea of the radical unknowability of God, failing to perceive that I had merely extended the heresy of iconoclasm not only to images but to all thoughts.

Belated as it may be, gardening and farming have taught me more about the world, myself, and consciousness than most of my reading. Tending living things sensitized me to what life needs. Tending animals developed a feeling for what souls need. Comparing these, I found inevitable analogies. A plant and an animal don’t have contradictory needs but share many of the same, albeit in their own ways.

It’s easy to see how two things are different. Anyone can see that an apple and an orange aren’t the same thing, but only a fool cannot recognize that both are fruit. Even an animal can recognize both are food! The mark of intelligence is the ability to see how radically different things share an inner relationship. All you need is external appearances to distinguish one thing from another, but recognizing how the soul grows like a plant between the physical world and the spiritual world not only discloses more about the physical world but conveys insight about the spiritual world as well.

It’s easy to see how two things are different. Anyone can see that an apple and an orange are different, but a fool cannot recognize that both are fruit. The mark of intelligence is the ability to see how radically different things share an inner relationship.

Without this web of interbeing, in which everything is contained within everything else, the universe is not a universe but rather a chaotic assemblage of intersecting particles. Lacking the capacity to think by analogy, my experience of the Calvinist universe was one of sheer absurdity.

Absurdism is how the universe appears viewed through the lens of human reason alone. Everything you make is destroyed. Anything you can acquire can and will be taken away. Reason cannot circumscribe what is beyond its capacities. To live bound within the narrow limits of human cleverness is like saying that because I can’t fly, nothing exists above the ground on which I walk. And, if you’re Calvinist, you’re doomed or saved arbitrarily. You might as well just trash the idea of God altogether and resign yourself as a determinist. There’s no reason to do anything in a deterministic view, so when people really believe it, they become calcified versions of themselves, unable to improve because self-development is not a possibility except by divine interruption. But, with Rudolf Steiner, we can “recognize no world dictator”⁵ without also removing all human culpability. Without freedom, there is no blame. Without freedom, God is not good.

Though the French thinker Albert Camus claimed he did “not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system,”⁶ and remarks that “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.”⁷ What does it matter if the world is not reasonable? Of course, it’s not! The world is the imagination of God — his lilah — which obeys more the dynamics of the dreamworld than of linear reason. When mere reason looks out at the world, it sees accurately: all your deeds are self-negating. One might almost imagine King Solomon interjecting here, “for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.”⁸ You can live heroically like Achilles and die young — and famous… But in death, that same hero only wishes to have remained a poor farmer — and alive. The shade of that wrathful warrior tells Odysseus:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.⁹

The dead benefit nothing from fame. So what’s the point? We must have another way of thinking that is not simply shattering wholes into shards but rather finding the likeness between distinct things. When stiff logic gives way to fluid analogy, we begin to think in the language of Creation itself. If we cannot think by analogy, death appears as an impenetrable wall of finality. The inability to think analogically fuels our desperation, leading to inequality, wars, and calamities. Jesus says the second greatest commandment is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”¹⁰ If the reader cannot imagine this analogy, this way of life is impossible.

St. Bonaventura speaks to the reflected divine light in everything, which still retains a glow of divinity:

Et sic patet quod totus mundus est sicut unum speculum plenum luminibus praesentantibus divinam sapientiam, et sicut carbo effundens lucem.

And it thus appears that the entire world is like a single mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom, or as charcoal emitting light.¹¹

My Calvinist potato farmer interrupted my thoughts, “Now, you’re not saying God is everything, are you?” To which I responded, pointing to the sun over our heads, “Is the sun these plants? They live and move and have their being because of the sun, and their life is from the constant influx of new light. And we eat the sun whenever we eat an apple. Is a leaf its sugar? Is sugar light? Is light the sun? Who would ever confuse the sun and a plant?”

Likewise, our conscious experience is like the leaf, which is sustained by a constant influx of divine love.

But what do we do to ensure parasitic habits don’t infest us? How do we place the soul in the light? How do you?

Our souls photosynthesize grace.

We know two things are different. Even to count two chairs as “two” is not to say they are absolutely identical, but that they are both chairs, no matter how different they look. Classifying wolves, foxes, and chihuahuas as “canine” requires thinking by analogy. As Valentin Tomberg writes, even the sciences are not exempt from thinking by analogy:

“The procedure of classification of objects on the basis of their resemblance is the first step on the way of research by the inductive method. It presupposes the analogy of objects to be classified.”¹²

So, what do these analogies say to us? The only way to understand God is in terms of ourselves. While limited, this is all we can perceive. As the hermetic maxim says, like perceives like. I cannot perceive what I am not. Extended to God who has “purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on wrong.”¹³ God, in his purity, can only perceive his reflection. In rocks, he perceives a hint of being, in plants, he perceives liveliness, in animals, he perceives dynamism, but in human beings, God perceives an image of Himself. It is as if what is unlike God is, in a way, not merely unreal but almost imperceptible to God because that which is perfect can only perceive that which is likewise perfect.

God says, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”¹⁴ And so, God hides himself. In Kabbalah, this is called tzimtzum (צמצום), which indicates a kind of withdrawal or contraction. If God is omnipresent light, he must create a void over which his spirit may hover. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”¹⁵ The beginning is a paradox. God creates ex nihilo, but his first act is to create a “nothing” into which he can allow a single ray of divinity to enter. The nothing out of which the world is born is the Virgin Sophia: Mary, the Womb of the World. If we were face-to-face with the absolute, it would be intolerable, and nothing else could be present to our consciousness. So, God hides himself:

vere tu es Deus absconditus Deus Israhel salvator¹⁶

Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

But God’s hiding is not a negation but rather limiting the presence of divinity so we can perceive it at all. Imagine an invisible ghost in a room. A white bedsheet thrown over the ghost reveals its form by the very means of concealment.

Creation is a metaphor. We cannot tolerate the entirety of God’s presence at once, so he wraps it up so we can see Him at all. But all this around you? It’s a metaphor for God’s endless love for you. The world is saying something, and the message is for you. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”¹⁷ Because the world is an analogy of God’s love, then the way to understand the meaning of the world is through analogy.

The primary source of fulfillment does not come from reason. How could it? What we can encapsulate is necessarily limited, and the expanse of truth is infinite. And since desire is unlimited (and contradictory) in its scope, the finite assemblages of systematic reason do not get us very far. Even for Camus, reason has its limits, and the imagination must redeem the situation. Camus asserts, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”¹⁸ And here we find the source of happiness: the imagination. This sounds comparable to Simone Weil who says, “imaginary advantages alone supply the energy required for unlimited efforts.”¹⁹ Imagined goals do not mean false or delusional aims. After all, we must always imagine something first in order to enact it, just as an architect creates a design before a house is built.

If I cannot see how I am related to rocks, plants, animals, and, most importantly, other human beings, the universe is absurd. We repair the world by seeking out the divine likeness in everything. That divine likeness is the nectar of heaven and the salt of the earth. Even in — especially in — you.

1. Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, pg. 320

2. The Holy Geeta, Chapter 3, verse 14, with commentary from Swami Chinmayananda, PDF available: https://ia803003.us.archive.org/4/items/holygeetabyswamichinmayana/Holy%20Geeta%20by%20Swami%20Chinmayana.pdf

3. The Chumash (Stone Edition), page 11.

4. Source: al-Mu’jam al-Kabīr 13454

Grade: Sahih (authentic) according to Al-Albani

عَنِ ابْنِ عُمَرَ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَال لَمْ يَمْنَعْ قَوْمٌ زَكَاةَ أَمْوَالِهِمْ إِلا مُنِعُوا الْقَطْرَ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ وَلَوْلا الْبَهَائِمُ لَمْ يُمْطَرُوا

13454 المعجم الكبير للطبراني باب التاء

5204 المحدث الألباني خلاصة حكم المحدث صحيح في صحيح الجامع

5. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, pg. 261

6. Camus 1965, 1427

7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, pg. 21

8. Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

9. Homer, The Odyssey, pg. 265 lines 556-558

10. Matthew 22:39

11. Bonaventura, Collationes in Hexaemeron ii, pg. 27

12. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 23

13. Habbakuk 1:13

14. Exodus 33:20

15. Genesis 1:2

16. Vulgate, Isaiah 45:15

17. Matthew 11:15

18. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, pg. 123

19. Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, pg. 124