When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.

The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.

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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”

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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)

Know what I mean?

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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein