The invisible is invisible not just to sight but to all sensible instruments. Infra-red, ultra-violet, sensors of minute vibrations…any physical phenomenon. Visible things exist in the physical universe and if we can’t already observe them, we may yet develop the necessary technology – it is physically possible to observe these phenomena given the right conditions. Invisible things are metaphysical things, which are not composed of discrete atoms and don’t have any direct material effect, and which can never be observed no matter what instruments we develop, but which still have immense influence on the nature of things. Like mind, nous, like concepts, like dreams. Like angels and demons.
The invisible is only invisible if it doesn’t seem to exist at all.
The invisible and ineffable are matters of pure faith. You cannot know of them. The point of any religion is that you must jump off the cliff believing in the invisible things that religion says exist.
(This, as an aside, is why any religion based on belief in the visible, the non-Platonic (the material), will never be adequate for dealing with reality. As the basis of your thought, you must adopt a flexible wisdom, a philosophy, something invisible that doesn’t have any circumstantial edges, that can be applied to you. You can’t build a coherent worldview on a set of facts or current circumstances. Otherwise, for example, if you’re a committed communist, the fact that communism doesn’t work can disrupt the thing you build your life around.)
You cannot even perceive the invisible by logic, by the mind’s eye. It is forever out of reach. That’s why it’s called invisible. The invisible can be perceived only abstractly, by faith.
I’m not even talking about believing in any one conventionally understood religion. Faith looks like Sacco and Vanzetti about to die and believing in their own victory. “That agony is our triumph.”
Sometimes it looks like Kazantzakis’ Captain Michalis dying for something which, from an external perspective, is completely insane, which doesn’t help anything, but which is glory, pure, pointless glory. And, more than this, it is a voluntary sacrifice, not just for Crete, but for his own hungry soul, his own idea of the angry god within himself. There was zero logical reason for him to die, and yet it was the only option he could possibly take, the impetus of a higher idea of life. (Freedom and death – freedom is attained only when one faces…).
How do I know this? I too have been driven to mad and foolish actions by the needs of my own soul. Obviously not to the point of death – but I have disadvantaged myself, from (let’s say) a ‘secular’ perspective, where anyone in my position would have taken an opportunity to get ahead. And I thought then: “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”
The illogic and the conviction of faith and the actions it compels are always against logic – for faith is belief in the invisible, unaccounted for by logic. And yet, logically worked out, to live your life in this way is the only possible way – you must apply the invisible to all you do, because the visible, that which can be observed in the world, is subject to entropy and always has what I call an ‘attack vector’, a reason not to believe it, a thing that makes it outdated or unwise. To build your mental universe, you can trust only in universal principles, only in the invisible. The invisible, matters of faith, can guide you forever, because they have no exposed atoms, no attack vector, no entropy. The resulting paradox: to live your life according to logic is the most illogical way to live.
They say of magic that, by its definition, it can’t be understood, and when it is understood it’s just physics. In the same way, the invisible is that which can never be found, except at the moment of consummation, death.
verso folio 