Further reflections on the cosmic icon

Continuing our series of posts on Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monumental monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle). 
For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

We are working our way through Dr Smith's final chapter,entitled ''Pondering the Cosmic Icon''. He added it after the publication of the first edition of his monograph and it is rich in insights drawn from numerous sources, Eastern and Western.

A striking feature of the cosmic icon is that the interior, representing the intermediary domain, visibly dwarfs the circumference (representing the corporeal world). The corporeal is the one-dimensional boundary of the intermediary.

Look at point P on the circumference and note that it represents both a moment of time AND the corporeal world at that moment of time. This dual identity disqualifies relativistic physics in its entirety at a single stroke. There can be no such thing as ''space-time''.

Smith then makes a remarkable assertion:

Einsteinian physics may well prove to be the most profoundly erroneous theory ever seriously entertained, and doubtless the example par excellence of ''mixing apples and oranges.''

Returning to the cyclicity of time, the author invites us to keep our eye upon the moving point P in the construction and observes that the ''now'' of time is inseparable from the ''now'' of the corporeal world. Time and the corporeal cosmos prove to be inseparable. Furthermore, it s possible to assert that , just as the compass ''sweeps out'' time, the cosmos at large ''sweeps out'' time as it rotates diurnally about the earth, the fixed centre.

The Baptism of Christ. JJ Tissot. Brooklyn Museum.

[Reviewer's note: The cosmic icon as explained by Smith caused me to make a few notes in my Kindle edition at this point: 
A compass has three components: 1) the point in the centre ''O''; 2) the moving point  ''P''; 3) the vertex ''V'' proceeding from 1) & 2). Similarly, we have ''O'' and ''P'', with the radius ''R'' proceeding from both.  This recalls the Blessed Trinity: Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Note that 2) descends to the corporeal domain (the circumference).
In our corporeal world of time and space, we cannot live and move and have our being unless ''P'' continues to move; ''P'' cannot move without ''V''; neither ''P'' nor ''V'' can operate without ''O''; so each of the three participate equally but in different ways; ''O'' is the point of origin or initiator; God the Son descends from His Eternal Father to our world; He and the Father are inseparably linked in love so powerful as to attain a vertex in the Person of the Holy Ghost. Consider the Trinity at the Baptism of Christ: the Father is the nunc stans beyond space and time at ''O'', His beloved Son is in the Jordan at ''P'' and the Holy Ghost links the Two. I am left wondering whether the notorious ''Filioque'' debate between the Eastern and Roman Christians is not after all a merely semantic problem.The provenance of the Holy Ghost is in truth from God the Father as His originator but is in another sense from the fire of love between the Father and the Son.]

The revolving cosmos and the movement of the ''wanderers'' (the planets) suggests to Smith the very ''music of the spheres''.  He notes quantitative and qualitative properties of this cosmic movement, seeing in the latter a foundation of truth for the ancient ''superstition'' of astrology. Readers interested in Smith's argument regarding astrology should study the details in this chapter, including his references to Genesis 1:4 and Matt 2:2.

In the next post, we shall look at the evidence in sacred literature for the conception of a trichotomous universe.

To be continued.