Can we ever fully grasp the eternal why?
It’s the year 2050. SuperGrok spits out “42.” The eternal why1 ‘deciphered.’ Albeit, unintelligible to us mere mortals. The Divine lets out a wry smile. Perhaps humanity sheds a slither of hubris.
We may never understand the eternal why. Perhaps it’s as futile as attempting to grasp air with your hands.
If we do have a chance of deciphering it, I posit that, as koans suggest (including the one paraphrased above), it’s more likely to occur through direct experience, not solely through our intellect.
Perhaps, the eternal why is akin to a ‘meta-koan.’ Something which is unable to be ‘solved’ by the intellect, and actually exhausts it. Is it the Divine’s way of playfully winking at us? A sort of light-hearted cosmic joke? A macrocosmic, exalted version of the often impish/mischievous Zen masters of old?
Our collective understanding in this context may be filtered through the Dunning–Kruger effect. As we go further towards the micro- and macrocosmic extremes, our consensus often shatters and we get unmoored once more.
As Terrence McKenna highlighted, our extraordinary wealth of knowledge and discoveries from rationalistic science, all only ask for “one free miracle”—the Big Bang.
The hubris of mankind demonstrated in The Fall perhaps highlights the peril and folly of aiming to fully achieve the perspective/understanding of the Divine and humanity’s raison d'être.
The limit—highlighted by the unspoilt forbidden fruit—seems to be reached at both extremes of the micro- and macrocosmic scales (quantum physics and the anomalous wonders of the universe writ large). When we reach the lowest and highest resolution possible we often realise how little we know about the matter or space we encounter, whether in the quantum world or colossal voids in the unfathomably large universe. (Watch below for a psychedelic-free mini ego death.)
Sure, we have a much better grasp regarding the how of many things. But, do we really know more about the eternal why?
Perhaps a more appropriate question is: Can we ever truly know the eternal why? I doubt brute force of intellect and rationalistic science will achieve it, and we still need to acknowledge the pesky lurking miracle of the Big Bang.
Arguably, we may have a duller perspective on the eternal why than some older cultures richer in myth, reverence, and curiosity.
Some truly believe they have found the eternal why; but do we think we’ll reach a consensus of an empirically-backed eternal why, akin to our consensus that the Earth is spherical? (Flat-Earthers suggest that 100% consensus on a topic is not attainable.)
Certain spiritual and religious practices (many more than listed below) provide frameworks which suggest the human mind can’t fully fathom the eternal why.
Oswald Wirth highlights in Tarot of the Magicians the futility of attempting to make the unknowable fully knowable:
“The Fool, the symbol of the Ensoph. . . the Being-non-Being. . . through its absurd and contradictory aspect, confuses our reasoning power, but it imposes itself upon our reason as being necessary and ineluctable. . . .
Concerning our knowledge, we have here the undifferentiated Unity, that which is, although seeming to us as if non-existent. For in fact the absolute state of oneness is beyond the grasp of our perceptions which are enslaved to the law of contrasts. Perceiving, therefore, is synonymous with discernment. But what we can distinguish is infinitesimal compared with what remains fused in the imperceptible Oneness.”
Wirth’s description seems to mimic a koan in action, and evokes a similar feeling to the below excerpt from Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen:
“For it is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid. So long as the conscious intellect is frantically trying to clutch the world in its net of abstractions, and to insist that life be bound and fitted to its rigid categories, the mood of Taoism will remain incomprehensible; and the intellect will wear itself out.”
Watts’ and Wirth’s excerpts highlight a path in which one may get a step closer to experiencing a glimpse of non-duality. In alchemical language this is represented by a central tenet—the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). What on first glance looks like archaic nonsense, contains a Key in which opposition creates a whole; an Eastern equivalent is the ever-whirling Ying–Yang—arguably a simpler Key to interpret, although by no means lesser.
All of the above can be seen as Keys to unlock understanding, even if that understanding is understanding that human perception can’t fully understand the un-understandable.
The co-creators of the two of the most widely used tarot decks—Raider-Waite and Thoth—didn’t make their decks with cartomancy in mind. A. E. White in particular found the concept of using the deck for divination to be vulgar. They both viewed their decks as Keys—revealing and deciphering knowledge to patient initiates. (Oswald Wirth’s views on cartomancy softened over the years; in 1927 when he wrote Tarot of the Magicians, he was more amenable to it.)
I’m not suggesting that the above should discourage us, and in particular the most brilliant minds among us, from pushing limits and looking for the eternal why. Yet I wonder whether having some more humility and playfulness, and wondering whether it’s a bit of an unsolvable cosmic joke could be wise; maybe this is His way of winking at us. And if we ever experience a glimpse, savour it, imbue it, and don’t go mad trying to experience a bit more of it, as perhaps there is an upper ceiling to what we can experience, no matter which or how many avenues we fervishly pursue.
Perhaps like Alan Watts and many Zen masters of days gone by, we can lean into our impish nature, as perhaps this is the mind-state we are most likely to access a glimpse or two.
If one feels they do catch a glimpse, the limits of language become clear; great art—such as the feature image—which is open to interpretation by the observer (for example, does it suggest we can get a glimpse of the Divine if we reach out?) couldn’t rivalled by prose in it’s ability to act as a complex Key.
(The urge to capture and convey glimpses drove the aforementioned infamous tarot Keys; and Crowley’s frustration2 with the limits of language are clear as day to anyone who has read the Book of Thoth).3 A pertinent quote by C.G. Jung from “Liber Primus” of The Red Book, supports the limits, and perhaps profane nature, of language in certain contexts—maybe highlighting the futility of even writing an essay such as this, suggesting I should simply leave it to the great artists:
“But the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: “To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?””
I concede there is a chance—albeit a small one, I wager—that those in the future will look at us as unsophisticated savages due to our inability to decipher the eternal why. Perhaps our cyborg descendants will crack the code and manage to fully grasp, rather than glimpse. . .
It felt profane using an AI-generated image in the main body of the text or for the feature image, however, I was intrigued when playing around with Venice.ai regarding the first image generation I received (shown below) from the prompt: “Discovering the eternal why.”
It’s interesting to see an individual with their eye(s) closed. A closed eye is a symbol for the Fool major arcana in tarot, which corresponds with Ensoph in Kabbalah—the “Being-non-Being”—as Oswald Wirth describes it in The Tarot of the Magicians. The major arcana of the tarot are often viewed as the Fool’s journey; once the Fool reaches arcana 21: The World, the next step is to return to Ensoph; Manly P. Hall states something similar to this in The All Seeing Eye. (This explains why the Fool is unnumbered in Wirth’s Tarot; the Knapp–Hall tarot is heavily based on Wirth’s deck). Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. “Wild to be born,” is a phrase Laetitia Barbier uses to describe the Fool in Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive.
I’m not sure exactly what the phrase eternal why is meant to mean or represent, but it felt apt, and the former seems fitting for the context of the essay. (I suppose it’s partly my reasoning that if we presume there is some manifestation of the Divine, it surely—or at least hopefully—follows that there is a why behind Creation.)
I wonder whether his frustration at how limited language was for him to convey his deep understanding—a lifetime’s worth of occult investigation by the time he wrote The Book of Thoth—influenced his erudite, almost disdainful, style.
My understanding is that written Chinese is better suited for esoteric concepts than English prose. A more archaic iteration is often used for Fu Sigils, with some lines/traditions having their own specific interpretation and key that only they can decipher, as Benebell Wen explains in The Tao of Craft; also, written Chinese can provide illuminating, yet non-dogmatic, support to I Ching interpretations. It’s arguably more akin to artistry than prose. (I wonder whether attraction to Keys/ciphers is so compelling for the Western mind due to our lack of comparative endowment in terms of prose’s ability to handle esoteric concepts; as Jung believed, images and symbols occupy space that words cannot fill. Although this may be a large, uninformed leap the Ying–Yang being a more intelligible Key is perhaps partly due to the associated concepts being more intelligible in Chinese writing compared to the Western, predominantly English, equivalents, and the more elaborate alchemical Keys, at least from my (probably limited) understanding.)