There's No Substitute for Death

Greetings, denizens of One Cosmos, readers of the B’ob, virtue mavens, spiritual pilgrims, cool kits & cataphatic coons. I am the entity and frequent O.C. comment poster known to you as “Will." While Bob is taking some time off to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a male exotic dancer, I will be your substitute teacher.

Remember your substitute teachers from grade school? Remember that uncomfortable silence that fell upon the classroom like a cold mist when you realized that this *stranger*, this wholly unknown property, was at the helm? It seemed as if you had just gotten yourself to the point that you had made a rough peace with the ghastly idea of even having to attend school. You had learned what to avoid, how far to push, when to back off, when to attack. In fact, there was a comfortable familiarity with the predictable routine of shambling into class each morning. That gnawing fear that had lodged itself in your solar plexus like a glowing bar of plutonium had finally retreated. Why, going to school was almost fun!

And then... substitute teacher. The fear, the stomach-contracting paranoia, came flooding back. It was almost like the first day of school all over again. Well, that’s our situation now, isn’t it? Sure, I can empathize with your existential discomfort, but let me ask you something: did you ever once ask yourself what it was like for the substitute teacher? Did you ever once try to rise above your narrow and narcissistic self-regard to contemplate the fact that this was equally unknown terrortory for the substitute teacher? Well, DID YOU, you little brats? Hmm?

Well, I certainly didn’t. Which is why, in the time-honored manner of the grade school bad-boy miscreant who grows up to be a cop, I’m going to assume the role of Mister Iron Fist. Boys will sit on the east side of the classroom, girls to the east, please. No talking, no fidgeting, eyes straight ahead. Lisa, that attire is entirely inappropriate for class, go home, change, then you may return. A little more cleavage, please. Just kidding. Not really. I didn't say that. Bob, shut up! Speaking of inappropriate attire, get back to your exotic dancing. "Y-M-C-A, it's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A!"

Anyway: this naturally raises the subject of *change*, of metamorphosis (and don’t expect me to riff away with Bob’s jazz-like fluidity and panache). That change is a necessary part of life is a tired cliché, yet it would seem that never before has the obligation of acclimating oneself to and integrating change been more paramount than it is at present.

I sometimes reflect upon what seems to us to have been the essential *changeless-ness* of life prior to the last three centuries or so. One apparently led one’s life in the leisurely, stately rhythm of the procession of seasons. Hunt, farm, warm yourself by a fire at night, wear furs in the winter, etc. etc. Aside from falling off a cliff, the fastest a human could travel was on the back of a horse. Most never ventured 30 miles from where they were born. Basically, this was your life, day after day, year after year, century after century. And it would always be.

What is it then about our human organism, the human neurological system, that managed to adjust to this incredibly fast-paced manner in which we moderns live? It would seem that three centuries is scarcely enough time for the human brain to develop a processing capacity that could absorb what some would say is the unnatural change-flow that we humans have to negotiate.

Well, perhaps the truth is that nothing has changed regarding the human capacity to absorb change. What’s the greatest change we can experience? I think it would probably be death, wouldn’t you? Nothing like shuttling off the old mortal coil to make one marvel at just how changeable things can really be. Death: Prince of Changes. In this respect, the premoderns were certainly more acquainted with change than we moderns are. Death was a ubiquitous side-by-side companion for them in a way that it is not for most of us modern Westerners. Death in childbirth, death by disease, constant tribal warfare, etc. –- you were lucky if you reached the stoop-backed, gnarly age of 40, which was the old 70.

Q: So it’s good that we aren’t acquainted with that kind of traumatic change, isn’t it, Will?

Will: Not necessarily. Being exposed to death -- having to live under the constant threat of death -- can teach us much about the transience of physical life and about the always urgent need to be present and aware; it compels us to ponder the great ontological questions.

Q: Ah, so it’s a bad thing that we live in an age where death does not play such a prime role in our quotidian lives?

Will: What kind of barmy calliope music do you have rattling around your vacant braincase? Who would want to live with death as the nutty next-door neighbor who’s always popping in unannounced?

Here’s something else to consider: while we must change in order to grow, we moderns have the luxury, indeed, the individuality and self-autonomy, to consciously and creatively shape the changes we must experience, in a way the premoderns did not. You might say that you can arrange your own birth -- which is to say, death.

Of course, we always have the option of resisting change, in which case change will be forced upon us. Don’t like leaving the house to go about the untidy business of engaging the world? That’s a good recipe for being trapped in a house fire. Avoided eating sardines all your life because, well, they just looked icky? Well, you might just find yourself at a reception thrown by your fiancé’s beastly mother and, er, all there is to eat are sardine canapés, and, umm, you’re just so hungry you’ll pass out if you don’t eat something, and...

True, that was a bit of a lame example, but it could happen. Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea. Change is growth. What marks us as creatures unlike any other on earth is our divine capacity to consciously change ourselves, to grow, to expand and deepen our psychic horizons, our very consciousness. To what extent are we capable of growing? Well, a certain Someone once brazenly pointed out that we are “gods in the making." This is another way of saying that you must eat the sardine before circumstances force sardines upon you. "Sardine." "Sar-deen." "sar-DEEN." What a strange word for a miniature fish....

So knowing what we do about the necessity of change, why do we have a tendency to resist change, including Bob's odd and irrelevant insertions into my original pristine text? Obviously, change is uncomfortable, at least in its initial stages. We feel ourselves vulnerable when in new, unknown territory. Don’t ever underestimate the power that vulnerability can cast over the soul. We all know people who would rather continue living in miserable conditions than leave the familiarity of those conditions and face the uncertainty that comes with change. Remember, too, that change and growth imply entering new arenas of intimidating personal responsibility.

We might ask, why are we so comfortable with the familiar when we are indeed designed by God to change and grow? I think the human soul has a natural pull toward an ultimate rest, or stasis. There is a name for this ultimate stasis and rest: heaven. The comfort of familiarity to which we cling can all too often be an ersatz heaven. As we all know, the greatest of human follies is the desire to construct an earthly heaven. It is not only leftists, fellow-travelers, and fallow trivialers who go about the idiotic business of trying to establish earthly heavens. In a certain sense, we all do that when we resist the changes necessary for our spiritual growth, opting instead for the ersatz heaven of familiarity.

What does all of this imply? Well, basically this: earthly life is not supposed to be all that comfortable, and expecting it to be is a fantasy. The search for divine stasis and ultimate rest in this life will always be in vain. We must always be as accepting of and open to change as we can. The saints did not and do not spend their lives looking for divine stasis, as many would believe. Those who are familiar with the lives of the great saints know that theirs' was anything but a comfortable life -- that in fact, their lives were filled with incredible hardship and challenge. Their lives may have been cloistered in one sense, but they were always setting foot in unknown lands. In some ways, we might define a saint as someone who is wholly open to change.

We should know, however, that the best way –- the only way, really –- to prevent the coming changes from overwhelming us is to always keep a soul’s I on that which does not change: the immutable, the Eternal. In a sense, all of Creation is governed by two principles: that which does not change (the One) and that which is always changing (the Many) –- and the One interpenetrates the Many. Change without knowledge of the One is meaningless. But only absolutely.

So now after my little soliloquy about change and the necessity thereof, I’m sure you are all a tad more accepting of me as your substitute teacher, no?

No?

Very well.

Van, I see you passing a note to Joan back there. You want to read that note out loud to the class?

By the way, I’ve noticed that the blog Eject! Eject! Eject! is proposing an online community of virtue-minded citizens. When I read this, I thought, what a great idea! In fact, I thought it was a great idea when I first encountered the reality of it here in One Cosmos.

Left Behind: Mother Evolution's Atheistic Stragglers (5.31.09)

Ricky asked a good question at the end of yesterday's thread: why doesn't the bloody rabbit take a photo of Mackenzie -- I mean beside the fact that the rabbit is not interested in that kind of vegetable? But let's suppose there were a super-intelligent rabbit capable of.... of super-rabbit tricks, like attacking Jimmy Carter. Is there any reason to believe that it would possess anything resembling human intelligence? The same goes, by the way, for so-called extraterrestrial intelligence. Is there any reason to believe that extraterrestrial beings, even if intelligent, would possess human intelligence?

First of all, for a variety of scientific reasons I won't get into, I think the odds of intelligent beings on other planets are vanishingly remote. But even then, the idea that intelligence alone is sufficient to account for the humanness through which our intelligence is channelled is extraordinarily naive. Or put it this way: intelligence is necessary, but hardly sufficient, to account for our humanness. We are nothing at all like merely intelligent apes, but something else entirely.

In my book, I noted that humanness is an ontological station that is anterior to our having entered it. This is why, as we evolved into this space, it was not "empty," so to speak. Rather, it was quite "full," except that much of the information was implicit rather than explicit. It had to be unpacked and brought into being in the material world -- which we have been doing for the past 40,000 years or so. In the most general terms, we have been bringing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful into the world. Our attraction to these things can by no means be explained by (natural) intelligence itself, but is entirely separate from it.

There was a brief discussion of this in yesterday's thread, where Will used the allegory of a village of of the blind: "One individual suddenly develops eyesight, the first villager to do so. Quite the revelation! This individual's spatial sense deepens beyond his previous imaginings. And the colors! He never knew they existed.

"Taking in the sky, he tries to explain the color blue to the villagers. In fact, he tries to explain the concept of sky to them. Bottom line, he can't. He might use analogies like, well, 'blue' is like a coating that you can't really touch, plus it's sort of 'cold-like,' not like ice, but like river water, etc. Some of the villagers might be intrigued with his analogies, but that's a far as it would go. Most would dismiss him, would almost have to dismiss him, as crazy. They simply lack the frame of reference by which he senses colors -- eyesight.

"Anyway, I think that genuine apprehension of God and the Divine Archetypal Realm, to the extent that humans are capable of such, is literally the activation of sense organ(s), that is, a 6th, 7th (and on up) sense organ."

I agree with Will that such higher sense organs would have to correlate in some way with the human brain, but that they could not be reduced to it. For example, let's say that neurologists locate that part of the brain responsible for recognizing artistic beauty. Would this prove that the differences in beauty between, say, a Thomas Gainsborough and a Thomas Kinkade are not really real? This is not as stupid as it sounds, for I guarantee you that in the next six months the New York Times will run another dopey article about some earthbound neurologist who has discovered the part of the brain responsible for religion, or awareness of God, or mystical states. What this proves is precisely nothing -- except perhaps that every interior has an exterior (in the manner described by Ken Wilber) and that Thomas Dolby was right: it is possible to be blinded by science.

In response to Will's comment, I wrote that that our brain architecture "comes into being simultaneously with an encounter with a particular world." Interestingly, the latest research suggests not only that human evolution is still ongoing, but that it can occur much more rapidly than anyone had realized. Thus, the future evolution of homo raccoonicus could occur over the space of a few generations.

In his summary of the latest research, Nicholas Wade makes a number of points that are highly upsetting to the psycho-spiritual left, since he leaves little reason to doubt that various human groups acquire traits and abilities that others do not. He cites many examples, one of which being the Jews who, pound for pound, have contributed more to human excellence than any other group -- even more so when you consider that they have also been the most persecuted group down through history (no coincidence there).

For example, although they represent far less than 1% of the world’s population, Jews have won 15 to 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes, and perhaps constitute an even higher percentage of the world's greatest comedians. On the other hand, the Palestinians have won exactly one Nobel Prize, and of course it was given to one of the most depraved and disgusting monsters who ever drew breath. And the Palestinian contribution to comedy, although considerable, has been entirely unintended -- e.g. the wild-eyed imams with their crazed Friday evening sermons, the comical s'allapstiq "work accidents" in which they accidentally blow themselves up, the frenzied car swarms, etc. Israelis and Palestinians might as well be a different species -- which, in a way, they are. Not, of course, in any horizontal racial sense, but in a vertical sense. To say that one of them is more evolved than the other is a banality of the first rank, unless you are a leftist who doesn't believe in vertical rank.

Not only is this view not racist, but it is the polar opposite, for it means that ethnic traits are not fixed but subject to evolution, change and progress. But for some reason, the left doesn't like this kind of evolution. Rather, they argue that all cultures are equally beautiful and that any differences between them are arbitrary. Furthermore, if you argue that one culture is superior to another, you are a racist. Thus, the left habitually confuses race and culture, making it impossible to criticize -- and therefore help -- a dysfunctional culture without being called a racist. This is precisely what happened to one of the last great liberals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote so sensitively of the "tangle of pathology" afflicting African American culture. That all of his most dire predictions came to pass is of no consequence to the ideologically blinded "reality based community" -- the ironically named progressive left, another group that cannot evolve.

In any event, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday, it is clear to me that we are co-evolving the language to describe various "post-biological realities" as we enter into them. This is very much analogous to the early explorers of the new world, who all landed in different areas and came back with diverse and seemingly contradictory discriptions of the flora and fauna they'd found. At first, the descriptions of higher planes are going to be highly subjective and seemingly disconnected from the others, but as we increasingly colonize the space, we start to see how all the descriptions fit together. Certainly that is what I was trying to do with my book, and even more so with the blog, in part because I know that my neurology has changed as a consequence of repeated encounters with the New World. I see things very clearly now that were more shrouded before, just as I see things vaguely now that will presumably become clearer as I go.

You will notice that one of the atheists' biggest complaints about me is that I am "bigoted" against them. Which is true, if you abuse the term beyond recognition. To me, a bigot is someone who discriminates against another based upon some insignificant difference, such as race. It is another thing entirely to discriminate against an ideology or belief system. In this sense, discrimination is the essence of intelligence. I discriminate against atheism because one, I think it is intrinsically stupid, and two, I think it would be highly destructive if a significant number of people were reduced to its influence, instead of being just a small club of eccentrics and misfits.

And yes, when I say "destructive," I do mean destructive of the human being as I understand him. For it would mean the foreclosure of those supramental spiritual realities to which humans have unique access and that we are in the process of bringing into being.

One of the things you have no doubt noticed in the flurry of atheistic interest in my blog is that they admit to not understanding my ideas, and yet, object to them in the most strident terms. The reverse is obviously not true: there is nothing about atheism that cannot be understood by a normal adolescent schoolboy. But one of the atheists asks, "Does anyone understand what this guy is talking about, because there is no content that I can discern. It is literally vacuous, and atrociously written to boot. From any rational perspective, it is empty and devoid of coherence or significance [and] preposterously boring."

Another one writes of my "lurid and vacuous prose" which is "completely and utterly meaningless when analysed, hermeneutically [perhaps he meant "hermaneutically" --ed] or otherwise." Furthermore -- or less -- "even Bob couldn't explain rationally what he means by it, yet one does not have to be a psychiatrist to understand what his real problem is. Gagdad Bob is just another pathetically feeble individual" and even a "true psychopath." (Speaking of abusing clinical terms; in any event, how can I be a psychopath when they admit that they don't even understand me?)

Another one confesses total ignorance of what I write about, but then, in typical atheist fashion, assumes that the ignorance resides in me rather than her. She admits that my writing is a "confusing mess" to her, and that "Honestly, I think Bob spends more time thumbing through a thesaurus than he does with actually trying to make his thoughts coherent. It seems to me he's more concerned with impressing people with his 'fancy' words than he is with people understanding what he's trying to convey. What's the point of writing for others in the way Bob does, when you end up making your readers incapable of understanding what you're writing? Perhaps his stringing together a bunch of those 'fancy' words gets people to think he's understanding the issues on a higher plane, and those who are easily led follow along like sheep, believing that they're just too stupid to understand someone with such supposed 'important' thoughts/feelings. His 'followers are led to believe they're in the presence of somebody really important and special."

And this one is also too funny to ignore: "Regarding the chances of reaching the 'Racoons,' it would be silly to argue that any of them would ever be convinced to abondon their belief in god. However they may come to realize that this person whom they occasionally refer to as 'Fearless Leader' (and who refers to his own son from time to time as 'Future Leader') is a gross, opportunistic narcissist who does not truly share their values."

Like the Palestinkians, their humor is always inadvertent.

Anyway, given that my writing is empty, irrational, literally vacuous, devoid of content, incoherent, and insignificant, how can it simultaneously be a dangerous threat to atheists? If it is literally devoid of content, then that means there can be no objectionable content.

But again, as I have said all along, atheism is nothing more and nothing less than a frank confession of total ignorance of any ontologically real spiritual plane transcending the senses. It is simply the "final common pathway" of a spiritual failure to launch with diverse causes. Which is fine. If that's how they choose to live their lives, who am I to argue with them? I'm a liberal. I'm all for them squandering their liberty in any way they see fit. How can that pose a threat to them?

These are divisive times, both horizontally -- which is obvious -- and vertically, which is the true source of the horizontal strife, for cultural space is developmental time. As Will pointed out, "Obviously the most fractious time is when the outsiders [i.e., the vertical explorers] begin to expand in number and outreach. This is when the distinctions between old language and new would be most divisive. Attempts at conciliation between old and new would be inevitably, necessarily futile. Those of the old persuasion would have hope of becoming new -- should they so desire -- but the new can never return to the old status. They either eventually succeed in establishing newness or they are eliminated by the reactionary old."

Evolution is a harsh mysteress. I guess it would be nice if atheists were capable of understanding my writing, but then they wouldn't be atheists.

Ask Not for Whom the Trolls Yell

Dennis Prager has mentioned that one of the things that turned him toward religion was the experience of college. There he encountered, as have most of us, the utter foolishness -- the horror, really -- of secular liberal thought in all its ghastly maninfestations. Thus, to the extent that a modern (not classical) liberal education is useful, it is primarily as a bad example. Which is not nothing. We learn just as much from adverse experiences -- perhaps even more, in a way -- as we do from positive ones.

Another way of saying it is that the true path is straight and narrow. If we could imagine the Way as a line in space, arcing toward its nonlocal deustiny, then there is obviously a vast potential area for deviation. There is no way anyone makes it straight to the goal without deviations and mid-course corrections. But how does one know when one is actually making progress toward the goal?

I was reminded of this by our recent atheist trolls and the absurcular whirrledview they propagrate on the nerves, which is at turns stupid, monstrous or silly. Although we are always ridiculing them, hopefully it is in an instructive and good-natured way (despite their telling absence of humor). For example, the constitutionally impertinent Dupree made several surprisingly pertinent remarks yesterday, including the observation that "this is your brain on atheism." Thus, as it so happens, you can learn a great deal about God by listening to an atheist -- just as Dennis Prager learned a great deal about God by detouring through the academonic ivory tower of leftist babble.

I would even venture to say that we could learn a lot from someone as dense and unevolved as Herman, even though I let him know at the poutset that the bobverse was not true -- that there was literally nothing a man like him could learn about God from a man like me, at least in his present noncoonfiguration. That he confirmed this perception with over 100 comments (including the many comments that Dupree deleted because he felt they were so stupid as to lack even entertainment value) is in itself a powerful proof of the reality of coon scent.

Yes, in just his first few rudimentary grunts and gestures, this mothbreather to the One Cosmos flame was mysteriously able to provide a vivid clueprint of the dreary architecture of his soul -- or, shall we say, soullessness -- that let us know that we were dealing not just with a spiritual cipher, but someone who was -- for whatever reason -- resentful and hostile toward God. (Thus, the soullessness is entirely self-induced and, we pray, a temporary condition.)

Although I try to present these things in a lighthearted manner (i.e., "coon scent"), I am nevertheless talking about something real. There really is a "spiritual perfume" that is emitted by certain particularly lofty souls, just as there is a "soul stench" given off by others. In Herman's braincase, something tells me that we are also dealing with a closed head injury (er, figuratively), so it is unclear how much of his malevolence toward God is involumetary, if you cc what I mean.

That is, like a person who has been reduced to verbal "clanging," Herman kept repeating the same fragments of thought (fragments that in turn reveal a fractured existential state) to the effect that he would like for us to prove to him that God exists. Again, I knew that none of the kind advice that was offered to him would be of any benefit to him, since he lacked the underlying "qualifications," so to speak, for knowledge of God. In this regard, his story is a very old one, first recorded by Plato with his analogy of the cave. This analogy is so simple, and yet, it has never been surpassed, since it comes about as close to concrete and objective metaphysical truth as humans are capable of formulating.

Human beings live shackled in a cave that is illuminated by a light that comes from outside it. Thus, all they see is the play of shadows cast upon the wall, which they call "knowledge." One of the cave dwellers breaks free, turns around, and sees the actual source of light. He tries to tell the other cave-dwelling hermen about the light, but they don't want to hear it. Some think he's crazy, while others are outright hostile. And the rest is history -- or yesterday's thread.

Sri Aurobindo's simple formulation for seeing the light was aspiration-rejection-surrender, referring in a sense to the vertical, the horizontal, and the interior, respectively. That is, we aspire with heart, mind, and soul for that which surpasses us. At the same time, we reject the horizontal distractions and temptations that lure us down and out and cause us to deviate from our goal. And we humbly surrender, or empty ourselves before the object of our devotion.

I think you will see that Raccoons of whatever devotional stripe agree on the basics of this formulation, and it is one of the things that distinguishes us from the new-age sew-age. As I have mentioned before, for a number of years I tried to be a "do-it-yoursopher," as I was attracted to spirituality -- as indeed nearly all humans are - but biased against God, largely as a result of my postmodern brainwashing and souldirtying.

In ether worlds, I wanted to have the experience in the absence of its transcendent cause. Therefore, I was attracted to such approaches as Zen, since it seemed to be free of dogma -- and of God. Just sit, close your eyes, and wait for "liberation." Thus there was rejection and perhaps a little aspiration, but no true surrender, since there was no One to surrender to. I suppose you could say that you surrender to "it," but "it" doesn't come down and meet you halfway -- which is why you can sit for your whole life and probably not have the experience of moksha.

But for me, the key was surrender, for only in surrender does the grace even have a space to operate. And afterwards, it is the grace that does all of the work, not us. Or, to put it another way, our task is to do what we can to allow the grace to operate. We do not change or "grow" our spiritual selves, any more than we grow our own bodies. True, we can do certain things "at the margins" to make our bones stronger or our muscles bigger, but none of us could actually create a muscle or bone, much less the spiritual self which will grow under the proper circumstances. It is an organic or natural process -- albeit a supernaturally natural one.

I don't want to put words into his fingers, but in response to the Dense One, JWM essentially highlighted the truism that the only God that can be proven to exist is the God you are capable of experiencing (although again, it is the grace that makes the experience possible). Everything else is either speculation or dogma (the latter of which is a necessary but insufficient cause). As I pointed out in my worstselling book, all traditions recognize this spiritual truth in one way or another. Thus, in the words of Hieromonk Damascene, author of Christ the Eternal Tao, "the only way to get past religious words and concepts is to seek, without compromise and self-pity, the Reality behind them."

Or, in the words of another Orthodox monk, "without the experience and testimony of the saints about the reality of God, the Bible would be an empty letter." Similarly, Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote that dogmas "can only point to the mysteries of God" and "mark a way, not an end.... Dogmas are obstacles unless they serve as humble signposts along the way." The greatest pagan mystic, Plotinus, wrote that language must be cautiously employed "only to give direction, to urge toward that vision beyond discourse, to point out the road to one desirous of seeing," while the Vedantin Nikhilananda wrote that "conclusions of the scriptures... must be experienced by the aspirant himself" or not at all. I could go on and on like Herman, only in reverse.

Which is a yoke, but one that is easy, not to mention funny-side up. That is, Herman's evident "circularity" is there for everyone to see. In fact, if my sniffer doesn't lie, he will no doubt be back today, telling us all about the little world of dancing shadows he sees as he circles the drain in an ever-tightening spiral. But I can only repeat that there is nothing a man like me can convey of God to a man like him. For one thing, a man like me can't even convey anything of God to a man like me. Rather, only God can do that. And for that to happen, I actually have to get mybob out of the way. In short, never do as I say, but do as I do. Only then will you -- or I, for that matter -- understand the mutter.

Infrahuman, Suprahuman, Human, and All Too Human

All Raccoons with an opened third nostril ("noustril") are aware of the distinked differences between the human, infrahuman, suprahuman, and various shades in between. Our recent atheist visitors were rendered hysterical at my tautologous statement -- a banality, really -- to the effect that atheists understand God like a dog appreciates Beethoven. But girlish hysteria is just one of the many ways to exhibit the infrahuman -- or to be fair, the "all too human." Infrahuman should be reserved for the truly malodorous, such as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and other Nobel Prize winners.

"Be a man!" As soon as you say this to a boy -- which you must say or transmit in one form or another -- you are simultaneously saying to stop behaving like one. In other words, master yourself, transcend yourself, rise above yourself. Thus, there is hierarchy, or there is no man. The hierarchy is not merely about outward behavior. Rather, if one has truly transcended oneself, the behavior is simply the mark of an inner transformation -- or the failure of such.

Granted, there were and are times that this formula is abused. Naturally, it is possible for a bad man to imitate the gestures and bearing of the superior man, but he can only fool others who have not risen above themselves (the trousered apes of the U.N. come readily to mind). Again, if your coon scent is operative, you don't have this problem. You can smell one of these people a phony smile away. As I have said before, it doesn't just come through in the content of their communication, but through the essence of it. A person cannot really hide his essence except to people whose own essence is hidden from themselves -- which is a lot of people, by the way, certainly the majority. It is why people such as John Edwards or Hillary Clinton could ever even be considered to lead this great nation.

Still, there are enough people with a subcoonscious sniffer to know what's in the air, which is why, say, Hillary Clinton's "negatives" and Rudy Giuliani's "positives" are so high. As frightening and destructive as Clinton's policies are, her negatives have nothing to do with that. Rather, they are a response -- instant feedback, as it were -- to the state of her soul, which is getting very close to Nobel territory. Likewise, no matter how negatively the liberal media tries to depict Giuliani, normal people have a positive reaction to him (as they did with Reagan).

Just as we are aware of the infrahuman, we are aware of the suprahuman, for the one implies the other. Just as you can fail to achieve proper humanness, you can surpass it. In fact, speaking only for myself, I am perhaps even more "suprahuman oriented" than I am "God oriented." Or, I find the most direct and vivid evidence of God in the form of certain particularly lofty souls who directly transmit the realm of the suprahuman. Apparently, this is a controversial claim in Protestantism, but not so in Catholicism and certainly not in Orthodoxy (much less, Vedanta), where there is very much of an awareness of how extraordinarily helpful the saints can be to us. Again, not just in a didactic or educational way, but in the form of a direct spiritual transmission. And it is a guruvy two-way transmission, as in Father so-and-so, pray to God for us!

I judge religious writings solely in non-discursive and "suprahuman" terms, by the spiritual "perfume" they emit. If they aren't readolent with this written fragrance, then they are not likely to be very helpful, much less transformative. This is why I dismiss the Deepaks and most of the other new-agers as frauds. It's not out of any maliciousness, but because I just can't stand the smell. It's the same with atheists. Again, as always, not the ones who, for whatever reason, are simply indifferent to the spiritual realm. Rather, the ones who are passionately hostile to it. How could they not be lost and tangled in the web of the infrahuman?

I'll tell you how. As someone -- it might have been Will -- pointed out, for a serious seeker, atheism is quite frequently a "stop along the way," as it was for me and I imagine the majority of Raccoons. In a certain sense, giving oneself over to atheism is a spiritually generous act of kenosis, or complete self-emptying, analogous -- roughly, of course -- to Christ's descent into hell. In Balthasar's unique interpretation -- which is controversial -- Christ does not enter hell "triumphantly" trailing clouds of glory, but as part of his complete identification with fallen man and his ultimate fate. Only upon hitting rock bottom does the true transfiguration of man become a possibility in the divine-cosmic economy.

So one of the reasons Raccoons do not take atheism seriously -- why we do not argue with you, but laugh at you -- is because we have been there. Truly, there is nothing you can say that we haven't heard before. And besides, whatever you say is so thoroughly tangential to our personal experience that all we can say is "if it pleases you, go nuts." One of these atheists made the bizarre accusation that I was "attacking" them, which can only be maintained if you nurture a very special kind of narcissistic need for persecution and self-victimization. How can you feel persecuted by a group of crazies having a private conversation amongst themselves? I do not write for an atheist audience, any more than Beethoven composed his symphonies for canines. (Not to make the unfair comparison of a musical dawg such as myself to the suprahuman Beethoven.)

Sorry. That was just a bunch of unfocused rambling. Let's get serious, and try to determine what a human being actually is, for only in so doing will we be in a better position to discuss the infrahuman and the suprahuman. Sri Aurobindo maintained that the human being was not a fixed entity but a possibility; not an island but a bridge; not a wall but a door or window. But this is really no different than the distinction between the mirror and the image. In this sense, developmental time is simply the distance between what we are and what we are to become.

And that we ought to become something automatically implies that there is something that we ought not be. For example, even the breathless atheists maintain that I ought not be such a bigot. There is nothing in their ontology that can explain why I shouldn't be one if I prefer to be one; nor is their anything in their ontology that can account for the free will with which I could make such a choice, but metaphysical absurdity can pose no barrier to a self-refuting ontology which is the essence of absurdity anyway.

(Speaking of which, Mackenzie, this month's reserpient of the One Cosmos Trolls Royce award -- the wiener by a nose over his fulsome friend Cline -- just left a comment at 6:21 that is so stupid as to be beyond disbelief. To think that such malicious stupidity is susceptible to reason, fact, or logic is beneath a proper Raccoon. Again, any Raccoon should be able to smell the realm from which this troll is operating. It is hardly "neutral," but lucilphuric.)

Here is a typically gem-like quote from Schuon that shall be our starting point: "There is a great deal of talk these days about 'humanism,' talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly 'human.'" Furthermore, "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial; whereas the human in the ideal sense draws its reason for existence and its entire content from that which transcends the individual and the earthly."

Obvious, no? But would it be possible to make this so obvious that even the atheist could understand it? No. It is already as obvious and clear as it is possible to be. The fault, or "lack" is not within the message but the recipient, who is incapable, for whatever reason, of elevating his mind to the realm from which spiritual truth arises. Indeed, rather than merely "understanding" it, he is offended by it. In this regard, he experiences the open hand as a fist. Which I suppose makes sense. Bacteria are not big fans of Lysol.

Here is another, more subtle observation: "There is nothing human which is not an evil from some point of view: even tradition itself is in certain respects an 'evil,' since it must handle evil things in man and these human ills invade it in their turn, but it is then a lesser evil, or a 'necessary evil,' and, humanly speaking, it would obviously be far truer to call it a 'good.' The pure truth is that 'God alone is good' and that every earthly thing has some ambiguous side to it."

Thus, all Raccoons are fully aware of their lower nature, which automatically coonfurs protection against the kind of religious authoritarianism envisioned by the atheist trolls. If we are "better" than others, it is only because we are worse, and have had to repeatedly surpass ourselves. I am not nearly grandiose enough to claim that I am the worst of all. That designation is reserved for the true saints. That the atheists could see me in such a light is the highest flattery, if only I were thurstoning for such magooey blindishments, not to mention howeling for such maroonic loveys.

Now, here is how you end up being lojacked on the infrahuman plane. The miracle of our humanness has "a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or 'condemns' -- man to surpass himself; man is totally himself only by transcending himself. Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals which -- by their form and mode of passive contemplativity -- participate adequately and innocently in a celestial archetype; in a certain respect, a noble animal is superior to a vile man" (Schuon).

What a mean thing to say about Mackenzie, whose comments continue to frantically stink beneath themselves, and he with them.

I'm running out of time, so I'll just leave you with another observation which I think you'll agree is the esscence of claritin for your stuffed up nous:

"In a word, there is nothing more inhuman than humanism, by the fact that it, so to speak, decapitates man: wishing to make of him an animal which is perfect, it succeeds in turning him into a perfect animal; not all at once -- because it has the fragmentary merit of abolishing certain barbaric traits -- but in the long run, since it inevitably ends by 're-barbarizing' society, while 'dehumanizing' it ipso facto in depth."

Who could say it isn't so?

You know who. Let's just say they're not heaven scent. Hey Mac, open another window!

Smell ya' later.

Sacrifice, Transcendence, and Vertical Recollection

Memorial Day -- like any holy-day -- is not a remembrance of things past, but of things present; specifically, it is a remembrance of things surpassed, or of the things that surpass us. Specifically, it is an occasion for vertical recollection of a divine archetype that is present now -- can only be present now -- but requires the substance of ritual in order to vividly apprehend and renew it.

We remember our heroes because they illuminate the eternal realm of the heroic, a realm that we must treasure and venerate if we are to survive as a culture. Not only is the hero a transcendent archetype, but he is only heroic because he has sacrificed something in defense of another archetype -- truth, liberty, beauty, the good, etc. In the absence of this true formulation, neither the heroic nor his sacrifice make any sense at all. This is why to "deconstruct," say, George Washington, is not just an attack on the father of our country, but on fatherhood, God, and the realm of transcendent (i.e., the Real) in general.

Will just left a lengthy comment that touches on many of the things I wanted to write about this morning. I will simply quote him:

"Memorial Day is certainly for honoring the fallen heroes of our military, and John Edwards' attempt to bastardize it for political ends is cheap to the point of 'deconstruction' profanity. Like most leftist stunts, it focuses on something that is, in the highest spiritual sense, truly ceremonial and attempts to tear away its divine resonance.

"So I was thinking, in what way is Memorial Day larger than it is -- as all spiritual ceremonies truly are? Well, as has been pointed out here, it's obvious that Memorial Day is a day for celebrating, honoring, remembering what heroism really means -- courageous self-sacrifice in the name higher ideals, principles, which are, to be sure, *spiritual* ideals and principles. So in one sense, our fallen military heroes are symbolic of this ideal. They are the most vivid, the most tangible representation of this ideal that we have before us. There are others, of course, who likewise are vivid, in-the-flesh symbols of this spiritual ideal: police, firefighters, the occasional citizen who rises to the heroic occasion and is so publicly honored. There is no hero, however, quite as vivid, quite so symbolic of self-sacrificing virtue than the military hero.

"The great wonder of it, of course, is that our fallen heroes are not paintings, statues, images -- they were and are human. They are us. And still they are symbols, ideals in the flesh -- destiny selected them to serve this role. That role is to remind us that we all are potential self-sacrificing heroes, that we all are of divine essence. Somehow, on some level, we must realize this, otherwise we wouldn't have a day for honoring our fallen heroes.

"The other day Bob alluded to the some of the symbolic threads in the Wizard of Oz. Overview-wise, I have long seen WoO as a tale of a journey into the Realm of Divine Archetypes wherein we (through Dorothy) see ourselves, and others, in our real, divine essence. In her eyes, her Kansas friends and acquaintances became Scarecrow, Lion, Tin Man -- became, in effect, their true selves, all on a heroic quest to reclaim their spiritual birthright. In Kansas, they were just dusty average Joes. In the Higher Realm, they were their real selves, knights, heroes.

"Most of us are Kansans. We do not have a symbolic public role to play. And yet there are countless souls who commit unseen (by the public) acts of tremendous self-sacrifice and heroism, whose deeds will never be acknowledged -- in some cases, not by a single other -- in this world. Our military heroes remind us that such heroism is possible. The secular attempt to 'deconstruct' military heroism is no less than an attempt to sever us from our Oz, our spiritual reality. We need daily remind ourselves that we are on the yellow brick road of our personal heroic quest. And we need to remind ourselves that, though our personal acts of heroism may never be acclaimed in this life, we will, in the fullness of time, be acknowledged as the heroes we imagine ourselves to be."

*****

About the only thing I can add is that John Edwards is a yellow prick load.

As a prelude.... I guess it's not a prelude anymore.... But anyway, I am reminded of a couple of particularly resonant lines in Van der Leun's beautiful piece yesterday, Small Flags: "These days we resent, it seems, having [cemeteries] fill at all, clinging to our tiny lives with a passion that passes all understanding; clinging to our large liberty with the belief that all payments on such a loan will be interest-free and deferred for at least 100 years."

Elsewhere he writes, "It is not, of course, that the size of the sacrifice has been reduced. That remains the largest gift one free man may give to the country that sustained him. It is instead the regard of the country for whom the sacrifices were made that has gotten smaller, eroded by the self-love that the secular celebrate above all other values" (emphasis mine).

*****

Ven der Leun touches on many themes that could be expanded into entire posts: the desperate clinging to our tiny lives; the earthly passion that passes all understanding since it denies transcendence; the notion that liberty is free (even less costly than air or water, which at least require the sacrifice of toilet tissue); that death is the greatest gift one man can give another; and that self-love is the polar opposite of true love and sacrifice, and that which causes the country to contract vertically even as it expands in every other way.

Sacred, sacrament, and sacrifice are all etymologically linked; all are derived from sacer, or to the holy and mysterious. This itself is interesting, for holy, of course, implies wholeness, and wholeness is indeed a portal to mystery, just as "partness" is a perpetual riddle that verges on the bizarre. For example, a psychotic person lives in a bizarre world of disconnected objects and experiences that he cannot synthesize into unity, or wholeness. Often he will superimpose a false unity in the form of paranoid delusions -- something we transparently see in a collective form on the left. Paranoia is "a false wholeness," but it is never far from the nameless dread that sponsors it.

A couple of days ago I noted the truism that leftist thought -- even more than being ruled by emotion -- is primarily iconic. Or one might say that the left simply has very passionate feelings about its icons, which they confuse with "thoughts." You can see this same phenomenon in our recent deust-up with the atheist folks, who are also (ironically, but not really) ruled by overpowering feelings about their own sacred icons. Point out where they are wrong, and they hysterically accuse you of calling them animals and depriving them of the humanity which they deprive themselves. Rational they are not. Or, at the very least, the more sober among them prove the adage that there is a form of madness that consists of losing everything with the exception of one's reason.

Back to the leftists. A disturbing number of them not only believe that Islamic terrorists are not engaged in a global war against Western civilization (or "civilization," for short), but that the United States government itself engineered 9-11. Van der Leun alludes to this, where he writes of how increasing numbers of American asses with Rosie-colored glasses prefer "to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this 'explanation' is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular."

Yes, the left is insane, but exactly kind of insanity is this? How have they become so detached from reality?

It has to do with the specific reality from which they have become detached. As another fine example of the shallowness and naivete of atheist thought, one of them writes that

"Millions and millions of people died in Russia and China under communist governments -- and those governments were both secular and atheistic, right? So weren't all of those people killed in the name of atheism and secularism? No. Atheism itself isn't a principle, cause, philosophy, or belief system which people fight, die, or kill for. Being killed by an atheist is no more being killed in the name of atheism than being killed by a tall person is being killed in the name of tallness."

This looks like a banal statement -- which it unavoidably is -- and yet, it is quite sinister in its implications, and illuminates all of Van der Leun's points mentioned above. First, atheism is petty and unworthy of man. No one would kill for it, just as no one would die for it, since it is the substance of meaninglessness, precisely. Why sacrifice one's life for the principle that there are no transcendent principles worth dying for?

The least of atheism's baleful effects is that it automatically makes the hero a fool because there is nothing worth defending. The more catastrophic effect is that it leaves the field open to evil-doers who are openly hostile to the transcendent principles that animate our uniquely decent and beautiful civilization. This is why you see an Old Europe that is supine before the barbarians in its midst who wish to destroy it. Socialism has nothing to do with "generosity" or selflessness; rather, it is the quintessence of selfishness, and diminishes a man down to the conviction that his animal needs should be provided for by someone else. The only thing that can rouse his passion is a threat to his entitlements. Only if the Islamists were to threaten their 12 weeks of paid vacation would they be taken seriously by socialist EUnuchs.

This is also why, as Ven der Leun writes, the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular. As I noted yesterday, this is the complete and utter cynicism that results from destroying the reality of the vertical and clinging to one's puny life with the passion that passes understanding.

For just as wholeness, the One, is associated with the peace that passes understanding, the exile from this real human world into the bizarre and fragmented world of the secular left brings not so much the passion that passes understanding, but the passion that cannot comprehend itself because it has no vector or direction beyond the self. In fact, nothing can be understood in the absence of that which it is converging upon, which reveals its meaning. To systematically deny the vertical is to obliterate the possibility of meaning and truth, which is obvious; however, it is also to destroy the hero and that transcendent reality for which he is willing to sacrifice his life.

Only in such a debased and (literally this time) subhuman world can a truly malevolent soul such as John Edwards be considered fit to rule, for there is nothing odd about cannibals electing a cannibal king -- or of the utterly cynical and self-absorbed voting for one of their own.

Of the sacred, Schuon writes that it is in the first place "attached to the transcendent order, secondly, possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the comprehension and control of the ordinary human mind. Imagine a tree whose leaves, having no kind of direct knowledge about the root, hold a discussion about whether or not a root exists and what its form is if it does: if a voice then came from the root telling them that the root does exist and what its form is, that message would be sacred."

Again, the message is sacred and holy because it is transcendent and relates knowledge of the whole.

Therefore, the sacred also represents "the presence of the center in the periphery, of the immutable in the moving; dignity is essentially an expression of it, for in dignity too the center manifests outwardly; the heart is revealed in gestures. The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity." (Never again wonder at the profound lack of diginity of the left, for it is intrinsic and inevitable.)

Another way of saying it is that the sacred relates to the world as "the interference of the uncreate in the created, of the eternal in time, of the infinite in space, of the supraformal in forms; it is the mysterious introduction into one realm of existence of a presence which in reality contains and transcends that realm and could cause it to burst asunder in a sort of divine explosion. The sacred is the incommensurable, the transcendent, hidden within a fragile form belonging to this world; it has its own precise rules, its terrible aspects and its merciful qualities; moreover any violation of the sacred, even in art, has incalculable repercussions. Intrinsically the sacred is inviolable, and so much so that any attempted violation recoils on the head of the violator."

Yes with regard to the latter, be careful, because I might just drop a house on you!

Which brings us back to Will's riff on the Wizard of Oz. On the one hand, the United States, more than any other nation, is flat and dusty old Kansas. But at the same time, it is Oz, the vertical and shining Emerald City on a hill. We must never forget either fact, one of them Real, the other only merely real.

On Remembering the Heroic Sacrifice to Vertical Principles

In the space of just a generation or two, we have gone from the cultural ideal of the hero to the ideal of the antihero, the former being a rebel with a transcendent cause, the latter being a rebellious person without one. In light of this, Memorial Day almost seems quaint to many people, while for the left, it can only be a day of perversion and/or frank rebellion. John Edwards' attempt to turn the day into a protest against the military is about as cynical and low as it gets. Might as well turn the Martin Luther King Holiday into a celebration of petty racial divisiveness instead of the universal heroic struggle for human liberation.... Oh, wait a minute....

Although I revere Frithjof Schuon (among other men of singular spiritual genius), obviously I cannot go along with his total condemnation of modernity. And yet, I do wonder: is man becoming -- or has he already become -- something he was never intended to be? Are we, as a result of liberty, democracy, and especially the free market, achieving our potential, or are we deviating further and further away from it? Undoubtedly it is a bit of both, and it is critical that we understand which is which -- or, to ask it another way, what are the novel developments that bring us closer to our divine archetype -- that "please God," if you like -- and what are those that pull us further down into the mud?

I would never argue against the freedom of the free market; and yet, at the same time, it does need to be acknowledged that the radical transformations brought about by the market create a new kind of environment which no human actually created but to which we must nevertheless adapt. The things to which we must adapt range from being annoying to vacuous to satanic, and it is important that we not confuse who we are eternally with the transient conditions to which we must adapt. This is surely one of the purposes of religion: to show us the real human ideal and to keep the enduring goal of life in view, irrespective of the local conditions in which we find ourselves.

Indeed, one of the many miracles of scripture is that it somehow equally applies to barbarian nomadic tribes 3000 years ago as it does to modern people today. It is analogous to a great work of art, which is characterized by three things: universality, timelessness, and inexhaustibility. First, great art is universal -- it is trans- and cross-cultural, in such a way that any human being can love and appreciate it. This is why, for example, the moment man became man, he was capable of memorializing that fact with the artistic perfection seen in the cave paintings at Altamira or Lascaux. Our culture could not possibly be more different from their's, and yet, we are still astoneaged by the transcendent beauty that radiates from their hands.

Just as art and scripture are universal, they are timeless. Another way of saying it is that they partake of eternity, or that eternity radiates or is "transmitted" through them. This reminds me of our recent bonehead atheist visitors, who would undoubtedly say, "Duh, Bob, can you prove that?" To which I can only say, "yes, but not to you." All Raccoons are lovers of art, but not just any art. Rather, art that specifically transmits implicit knowledge of eternity and of eternal things. That the atheist is mired down below in the material mind is "not our problem." It would only become a problem if they were to somehow become the majority and therefore enfarce, even if unwettingly, their dryasdust infrahuman (and as always, I mean this literally, not as some sort of insult) voyage on the ocean of being.

Finally, great art and scripture are inexhaustible; which is to say, they partake of the infinite. What intrigues me, as a music lover, is how this quality of inexhaustibility can even be mysteriously present in a three-minute pop or blues number that was never intended to be more than jazz-age diversion or hippie FMera. I will admit that I am unable at this point in my life to truly appreciate the bottomless depths of Bach or Beethoven, but frankly, this is because I am still too distracted by lesser music that, in a way, is more mysterious for being so simple.

I don't want to get sidetracked into a musical discussion here, but an example that comes readily to mind is, say, the beautiful timbre of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar. Not the fluid virtuosity, the speed, the spontaneous creativity, just the pure sound itself. I am aware of at least one Raccoon who knows exactly what I'm talking about with regard to SRV's unique sound-signature. This tone cuts straight through to the soul (one of the ways we know we have one), but one wonders how? The same can be said for Van Morrison's growl, or Brian Wilson's blend of harmonies, or Sonny Rollins' sax tone, or the suspended silence between Bill Evans' piano notes. These are inexhaustible mysteries to which I can be exposed again and again without boredom or "saturation" ever setting in. It is always new -- which, of course, is one of the primary characteristics of the Old One.

God makes all things new -- which is why boredom is impossible on the spiritual path, or the "adventure of consciousness." This is yet another completely obvious statement that the atheist cannot possibly know (or he wouldn't be an atheist). And although this is a spiritual truth, it is actually something I discovered during the course of my psychotherapy, in particular, a period that lasted for several years in the late '80s and early 90s. I had finished my Ph.D., was married, and had finally left the supermarket for a "career" as a psychologist. I had even begun to publish papers in professional journals. And yet, something was wrong. I won't go into all the details, but the point is that I was unable to "renew my mind." Instead of the open spiral -- the adventure of consciousness -- I was on the line or circle. I had taken things as far as I could on the "human plane," so to speak, and I suppose it was pretty far by conventional standards. However, if I had stayed on that path, my life would have been more or less of a waste.

Not until I discovered the open circle of the higher life -- the divine-human limited lieability partnership -- did things really take off. But here is what I mean about the dangers of the modern society to which we must adapt. The only way you can vault yourself into this open circle is by detaching yourself, in one way or another, from the "world" as it is given to us. Thus, to an outside observer, it probably looked as if less and less were happening in my life, when the reverse was true: more and more was happening, only on a different plane.

The Orthodox Way begins with an anecdote about one of the Desert Fathers who went on a pilgrimage to Rome. There he "was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life -- for he was a great wanderer -- he called on her and asked: 'Why are you sitting here?' To which she replied: 'I am not sitting. I am on a journey.'

"Every Christian may apply these words to himself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveller.... We live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity."

Damn, I had intended this post to delve more deeply into the spiritual meaning and significance of the heroism of the men who have fought and died for our liberty. Let us just say that there are many Americans who maintain that the person who risks his life in defense of a transcendent ideal that doesn't actually exist can only be a fool, a loser, a victim. This is what the leftist means when he affirms his support of the troops. Our fighting men and women are too stupid to even know that they are simply being used by George Bush and his cronies -- which is a transparent projection of the utter cynicism, the complete spiritual vacuum at the heart of the left.

For if you have rejected God and cut yourself off from the transcendent plane, you must be a cynic. Or put it this way: you are either a believer or you are a cynic, and if you are a cynic, you are condemned to a plane in which the mind and spirit cannot renew themselves, for the simple reason that you are not an "open system," open to the source of our being. Therefore, among other things, you must compensate for the renewal of your mind with manic and pointless activities and pursuits. You may think you are excitedly "running to," but you are simply running from. You are not an activist but a lacktivist. Raccoons certainly see it, even if you can't. Frankly, you are pathetic -- which we say with empathy, not hostility.

The reason the cynic is cynical is because he has cashed in transcendence for immanence. Therefore, his cynicism is simply a natural reflection of his flatland existence. Just as hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, cynicism is the backhanded tribute immanence pays to transcendence -- or perhaps a sort of petty pleasure one takes in one's own self-imposed hexisle in the horizontal. And for the same reason these people are so cynical about weighty matters, they are the most gullible in their acceptance of shallow trivialities which rush in to fill the void, such as Al Gore's weather hysteria.

But the point of today's holiday is to honor those heroes who are heroic because they embodied and fought for the transcendent ideal of spiritual liberty -- not for the United States per se, but only insofar as the United States is the embodiment and realization of a spiritual ideal. Their lives and deaths have only been in vain to the extent that we squander our own God-given liberty and abandon the spiritual principles upon which this country was founded. Can you imagine the pain of thinking you had given your life for Paris Hilton or Bill Maher? I know that Raccoons know that this is not said in bitterness, but to illuminate a critically important principle.

To put it another way, although we can never repay the debt of gratitude we owe to these men and women, the only way we can begin to make it up to them is by living the transcendent ideal for which they gave their lives. It is the only way they -- and mankind -- can fulfill their spiritual mission in the divine spiral. So long as your life is not spiritually in vain, then neither will theirs' have been. It is something I never allow myself to forget.

(By the way, if there are any vets or active military out there -- or family -- who would like a free copy of my book, just drop me an email.)

Deep Stupidity and the Medicine for a Nightmare (5.13.10)

Unintelligent people are usually just plain wrong, so we don't have to worry much about them. On the other hand, in order to attain truly deep stupidity, one must generally be of above average intelligence. Therefore, in a certain very real sense, intelligence does not vary inversely with stupidity, but directly with it. Not for nothing has it been said that so much philosophy is simply "error on a grandiose scale."

A prime example of deep stupidity and grandiose error is Marxism and all of its many polluted streams, branches, creeks and crocks. That variants of this falsehood still proliferate on the left today means that, as always, intelligence alone is no unknowculation against evil, darkness, and error. Hardly.

For conservative "classical" liberals, we are generally faced with an odious choice between the stupid party and the evil party. We generally align ourselves with the former, since the former is at least susceptible to our influence, whereas the latter is not. Someone who has truly given himself over to evil is not going to be persuaded by truth. His intelligence is in the service of forces he neither sees nor understands, and there is just no point of entry in dealing with him, since he is not lacking information as such but light. Truly, you can hand them the truth on a silver platter, and they will not only reject it but be quite hostile to it.

There are many way to react to truth, only one of which is quiet acceptance. Truth is not just true, but a force. This is why it elicits such strong reactions in people. You will have undoubtedly noticed that when you comprehend a deep truth, there is a pleasant physical sensation that goes along with it -- hard to describe (Christopher Bollas calls it "the erotics of being"), but if you could amplify its vibrations, it would feel like getting the punch line of a joke, or the parts of your being lining up like iron filings, or perhaps properly hitting a baseball. If you hit the ball too close to your hands or too far toward the end of the bat, it's an unsatisfying feeling even if you get a base hit. But there is a feeling of deep satisfaction if you smack a troll right on the "sweet spot" of Hoarhey's cluebat.

Another way of saying it is that Truth is a presence. This is something all Raccoons will know by experience, but will make no sense to the leftist -- for whom it will literally be a meaningless statement. To suggest that Truth once dwelled among us -- and still does -- is the height of absurdity. But truth is the link between Being and knowing. Thus, to say, for example, that Christ is the truth is to say that he is a humanifestation of the divine presence, and vice versa. It's actually very simple, but simple isn't easy, much less simplistic.

Truth is not only not accepted by most people, but it seems to engender a counter-force that is actively hostile to it. This may seem like a controversial statement, but it is the stock in trade of psychoanalysis, which essentially comes down to a study of the varieties of self-deception, or the ways in which one part of the mind pulls the wool over another part. Think about that for a moment, and I think you'll agree that it is quite remarkable -- how the left brain literally doesn't know what the right brain is doing.

I say "literally" because there is good evidence that what we call the unconscious is actually "lodged," so to speak, in the nonverbal -- but also transverbal -- right brain. Every patient comes into treatment with what I call a "likely story." This explicit story is located in the left brain, the seat of language, aristotelian logic, and linear time. However, the right brain has its own story to tell, but how do you tell a story in the absence of verbal language? You do so in the form of symptoms, or quirky character traits, unexplainable likes and dislikes, unaccountable mood storms, obsessions, compulsions, or self-defeating behaviors that the left brain is powerless to stop. This is because every self-defeating behavior is ipso facto a self-fulfilling behavior for a part of the mind of which we are not consciously aware. "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all," sang Zimmie.

Freud stumbled upon the method of free association with which to try to understand the various agendas of the mind that ran counter to truth and were the source of psychological pain and dysfunction. There is no great mystery to free association, in which the patient lies down and tries to say whatever comes to mind without censoring it. It is simply a way to try to lull the left brain to sleep and allow the right brain to come out of the shadows. Sounds easy, but every step along the way is met with resistance which can become labyrinthine in its ability to prevent the discovery of the truth.

Here again this is remarkable, for it means that the part of the mind that is resisting must know the truth on some level, otherwise there would be no reason to resist it. Therefore, as Bion pointed out, the truth is prior to the lie, just as light must be prior to the shadow. Indeed, Bion went so far as to say that only the Lie requires a thinker -- and actually brings the thinker into being. On the other hand, truth requires only our accession to it. We simply "bow before reality" -- which, when you think about it, is an excellent way of putting it, for reverent bowing is one of the appropriate responses to the force, or presence, of truth.

Schuon said something similar when he wrote that "A truth is efficacious to the extent that we assimilate it; if it does not give us the strength we need, this merely proves we have not grasped it. It is not for the truth to be 'dynamic,' it is for us to be dynamic thanks to the truth. What is lacking in today’s world is a penetrating and comprehensive knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always accessible, but they could not be imposed on those who refuse to take them into consideration."

Ho!

Among other responses, truth engenders a dynamic sense of veneration -- a sense of the sacred. And this is why you will have noticed that the left attempts to surround so many of its moldy lies with the penumbra of sanctity. But the sanctity is entirely bogus -- it readily slides into the sanctimony that is intrinsic to the left. In a perverse way, this sanctimoniousness answers the human need for the sacred, but in an alternatively crudely sentimental or authoritarian manner enforced by the many varieties political correctness. (You will notice that the left's confusion of sentimentality with moral/religious depth is just as evident as their totalitarian mind control; they are not opposites but complementary -- like Hitler's sentimental love of dogs.)

This is why the left doesn't really have ideas but icons -- including "iconic ideas." It is an insidious and sinister process, because there is great psychological pressure on all us of to bow down before these false gods, as if they were actually sacred (for example, the many fawning MSM tributes to "the Goreacle"). And there is absolutely no symmetry in this. For example, if a conservative steps in one of the left's many sacred cowpies, there is a good chance that his career will be ruined. But if a leftist offends what is actually sacred, he will be praised as someone who "speaks truth to power." It is inconceivable that the media would trot out some moral equivalent of Christopher Hitchens to blast Martin Luther King on the occasion of his death because of the latter's embrace of dangerous socialist ideas. For one thing, few conservatives are so tasteless, not to mention enraged.

The point is that nearly every one of the leftists's core beliefs is not a proper idea but an icon, whether it is manmade global warming, being "for the little guy," affirmative action, abortion, homosexual behavior, "peace," "progress," multiculturalism, diversity -- in fact, "progressive" is the quintessence of a meaningless icon, since it bears no relationship to progress and promotes economic and social policies that ensure not just a lack of progress, but regression. For example, the "peace movement" can only bring about more war, just as affirmative action can only bring about harm to blacks.

And this is why it is so easy to be a conservative, because you no longer have to contort yourself with so many lies in order to be thoroughly consistent, both internally and externally. The left confuses their contortions with "nuance," but nuance is simply the left left brain's feeble attempt to keep reality at bay, which inevitably seeps in through the walls, ceilings, and floorboards. Or as Randy Newman sang,

Guilty, baby I’m guilty
And I’ll be guilty the rest of my life
How come I never do what I’m supposed to do
How come nothin’ that I try to do ever turns out right?

You know, you know how it is with me baby
You know, I just can’t stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else

This medicine is called leftism, but it has never actually cured anyone, much less a nation of people. Instead it rapidly worsens the disease it is intended to cure, so that greater and greater doses are required until the patient perishes -- if not literally, then in spirit, as we see in western Europe.

"It takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend I’m somebody else." Yes, it takes a whole lot of affirmative action for the leftist to pretend he's not a racist, and a whole lot of diversity to pretend he isn't intolerant of dissent. It takes a whole lot of coddling illegal immigrants to pretend they don't just want the votes, and whole lot of global warming to pretend they don't want to undermine the engine of global capitalism and progress. It takes a whole lot of outrage at President Bush to pretend they aren't allied with the Islamo-fascists, and a whole lot of talk about the "little guy" to pretend they aren't filled with class envy. And it takes a whole lot of multiculturalism to pretend they don't hate American culture and values, and a whole lot of fearful talk of separation between God and state to pretend they don't hate the former and love the latter.

Yeah boy, it takes a whole lot of moral relativism to pretend they're not immoral, and even more education to pretend they're not wrong.