The Gospels may be thought of as "holographic," in the sense that the events described therein are signs, signs are teachings, teachings are events, events are parables, etc. Everything in the Gospels is at once "fact, miracle, symbol, and revelation of the truth" (Tomberg).
There are only seven miracles described in the Gospel of John, beginning with the transformation of water into wine at the wedding at Cana, and ending with the raising of Lazarus. At the conclusion of John, he says that if every miracle attributable to Christ were to be recorded, "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."
Therefore, Tomberg suggests that the seven miracles of John are intended to be "archetypal," or to summarize certain categories of the miraculous -- of how humans, unlike any other beings in existence, may surpass themselves in the perpetual ocean of love, wisdom, and action.
Might there also be an implicit parallel between these seven miracles and the seven primordial acts of God described in Genesis 1-2? The Gospel writers were obviously intimately familiar with the Old Testament -- which was still pretty new -- and there are any number of places where they attempt to resonate with it -- for example, in Genesis 1.1 and the prologue of John ("In the beginning...").
Tomberg maintains that there is in fact an inverse relationship between the seven phases of creation in Genesis and the seven miracles of John. Thus, for example, the wedding at Cana somehow mirrors the seventh day of creation. But how?
Tomberg writes that the sabbath is the day on which "created being attains the highest level of inwardness: freedom. The seventh day of creation is the 'day' of the meaning of the world." And since it is only in love that freedom is perfect, ultimately divine-human love "is the foundation, the meaning, and the purpose of the world."
Real love is both the alpha and omega of existence, first God to man, followed by man to God, which completes the OntʘlOgical circle. And what is love of God? Schuon says that it is first "the attachment of the intelligence to the Truth," followed by "attachment of the will to the Good," and only then "attachment of the soul to the peace which is given by Truth and the Good" (emphasis mine).
Thus, slack is a side effect, as it were, of Truth and Virtue. Still, we were made for slack, since it is our proper end.
Love is the highest freedom, according to Tomberg, for "it is the sole element in human existence that cannot and may not be demanded. One can demand effort, veracity, honesty, obedience, the fulfillment of duties, but love may never be demanded. Love is and remains for all time a sanctuary of freedom, inaccessible to all compulsion.
"For this reason, the highest commandment -- 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind... and love your neighbor as yourself' -- is not a command, but a divine-human plea. For love cannot be commanded; it can only be prayed for."
This is also the American secret, for it is the one nation that is founded upon the primacy of spiritual liberty, which is to say, the possibility of genuine vertical (agape) and horizontal (caritas) love. Which is why Americans are patriotic citizens and not matriotic subjects. Half of us, anyway.
If the sabbath represents the conslackration of the free union of God and man, then a sort of cosmic divorce occurred as a consequence of the fall. Man was unfaithful to his vows, so to speak.
Thus, Tomberg writes that the wedding at Cana symbolically speaks to the restoration of this divine-human union, for it seems that marriage often "begins with enthusiasm, with the 'wine' of the honeymoon period, and ends with the 'water' of routine habit" (ibid).
The daily renewal of love is indeed a miracle, even though we rarely think about it in those terms. To put it another way, only love can renew the world, oneself, and one's wedding vows. At the wedding, Jesus not only transforms water into wine, but the second wine is even better than the first.
In other words, not only does the higher love not degenerate, but it is miraculously renewed and increased; as such, this miracle is the "sign" of the healing of marriage -- i.e., "healing in the service of restoring the marriage relationship to correspond to the divine cosmic archetype, which is the seventh day of creation."
Note that John 2:1 says that the wedding took place "on the third day." Why is this seemingly offhand comment inserted into the text? And when they run out of wine, it is specifically Jesus' mother who brings this message to her son. Interestingly, Jesus says something very strange, in that he immediately interprets Mary's news about the wine in symbolic terms, asking her, "what does your concern have to do with me? My hour has not yet come."
Thus, the wedding on the third day clearly has resonance with the entire mission of Jesus, in which he will restore the marriage between God and man on "the third day" (which is also the Christian sabbath), by pouring out a kind of infinite, inexhaustible love.
Tomberg notes that there are exactly six "waterpots of stone" at the wedding, apparently referencing the other six days of creation and the other six miracles. The reference to "stone" reminds me of something Schuon wrote, that
"When God is removed from the universe, it becomes a desert of rocks or ice; it is deprived of life and warmth, and every man who still has a sense of the integrally real refuses to admit that this should be reality.... Similarly for the soul: remove faith -- including the element of faith that forms part of gnosis -- and the soul becomes impoverished, chilled, rigid, and embittered, or it falls into a hedonism unworthy of the human state."
Skipping ahead a bit, wine once again comes into play when Jesus' "hour has come." In John 19:28, only after he knows that "all things were accomplished," he says "I thirst." He is given some sour -- which is to say, bad -- wine, which is placed to his mouth. After receiving it, he bows his head and says, "it is finished."
What is finished? One of the soldiers pierces his side, and "blood and water come out." At Cana, water is transformed into good wine. Here, as it were, bad and sour wine -- which is to say, the hateful karma of the world -- is transformed into water and blood. In the Bible -- and in antiquity in general -- "blood" always had spiritual connotations, and was regarded as the vehicle of life, while water carries two distinct meanings.
Back to Genesis 1. On the second day of creation, God separates the upper waters -- the waters above the firmament, or heaven -- from the lower waters. In fact, heaven is placed between the upper and lower waters, as a sort of dividing line. As such -- again, curiously -- heaven is not at the "top" of creation, but is a sort of membrane between upper and lower, or superior and inferior, waters.
But clearly, Jesus seems to be able to mediate between the upper and lower waters -- to bring about their harmonious union, in which the lower is transformed into the higher, and the higher descends into and infuses the lower.
Exacly what is the sacrament of marriage? It is the "inseparable bond between a man and a woman, created by human contract and ratified by divine grace. The nature of the covenant requires that the two participants be one man and one woman" and "that they be free to marry."
Marriage is founded upon consent, which "consists in a human act by which the partners mutually give themselves to each other. Consent must be a free act of the will of the consenting parties, free of coercion or grave external error. If freedom is lacking, the consent is invalid." Interestingly, "it is the spouses who are understood to confer marriage on each other. The spouses, as ministers of grace, naturally confer upon each other the sacrament of matrimony" (Tomberg).
Now, back to the union of God and man. Let's think about some of the constituent components of marriage: freedom to consent to an inseparable bond, absent any coercion; mutual surrender; male (God) and female (the soul); the parties freely choose to confer marriage upon each other, not one upon the other; and the parties become vehicles of grace for one another, through which the regenerative upper waters flow into the world, transforming water into good wine and sour wine into the upper waters of eternal life and love.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Monday, December 06, 2010
It's a Wonderful Reality Tunnel
The miracles of Jesus Christ reveal the secret of the influence exercised by individuals for the universal, and by the universal for the individual. --Valentin Tomberg
Let's talk about miracles. According to Schuon, the phenomenon of miracles "has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term 'supernatural.'”
In other words, there is in any phenomenon a combination of both horizontal and vertical causes. Some things are almost all horizontal, while others -- we call them miracles -- are predominantly vertical. Thus, what appears supernatural on the horizontal or terrestrial plane is actually “'natural'” on the universal scale."
Scientists, of course, "confuse the miraculous with the irrational and the arbitrary," but Aristotle was correct in his outline of the four types of causation: material and efficient, which are horizontal; and formal and final, which are vertical. This is why scientists are baffled by anything that clearly manifests final causation, such as free will. Acknowledging final causation would destroy their faith in matter, so they attempt to explain it through material and efficient causes only, which ends in self-refuting absurcularity.
According to Tomberg, the seven miracles recorded in the Gospel of John "represent the healing of the seven principal infirmities of human nature in both individuals and groups." As such, they are "not just miracles," but "signs of the future spiritual and bodily healing processes within the human organism, which is sick as a consequence of the fall of humanity" (emphasis mine).
Please note that healing of any kind has a teleonomic aspect, in the sense that it is an attempt on the part of the organism to "return" to its archetypal form (which is always "above" in space or "ahead" in time).
Three orthoparadoxical statements come immediately to mind: 1) The kingdom of God is within [or among] you, 2) Seek ye first this kingdom, and 3) from the Gospel of Thomas, The Father's kingdom is spread all over the world, but the folks cannot see it. Hold these thoughts for later.
Just as the scientist can deny the miraculous, it is possible for the religionist to deny the mundane, so to speak. And he would be ontologically correct in doing so, although it would make functioning in the world difficult. I mean, someone has to grow the food, make the clothes, and take out the trash.
The point is, since verticality takes priority over horizontality, we could say that there is an "upper vertical" magic and a "lower vertical" magic (one is reminded of the observation that Isaac Newton was not the first scientist but the last magician).
Which is why signs and wonders are happening all the time -- i.e., the Father's kingdom is spread all over the world -- but the interventions are so subtle that we may underlook them, so to speak.
We may also fail to notice them because we can only scamper through one reality tunnel, and cannot see the other timetube that "might have been" in the absence of the vertical influence. It is not possible to conduct a double blind study on reality, which is why faith is unavoidable, whether secular or religious (e.g., Paul Krugman and other leftist economists have the faith that if only Obama had spent a few trillion more, the economy would be in great shape).
Of course, this is the great spiritual lesson of It's a Wonderful Life, which is about a man who spends his life selflessly aligning himself with the good, at great personal cost. However, in his case, he is shown the alternate reality that might have been had he spent his life pursuing only his egoic desires. Thus, he is able to understand that by acting so selflessly, he was actually socking away capital in a moral bank account that is "not of this world."
Another way of saying it is that George is granted the spiritual boon of a clear vision of all the miracles and magic that had occurred in his life as a result of unselfishly aligning himself with the Good.
And realizing this is the greatest miracle of all, for with this realization, the magic that had always been operating in his life bursts upon him like a sudden downpour of grace. What a tragic waste of life to miss the magic that is happening all the time, for this magic is precisely what nourishes the soul and feeds the "second birth." Living for others is a great liberation.
The same lesson is present in Dickens' Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge is first given a vision of the forces that went into exiling him from the greater reality and enclosing him in the cold world of his bitter and envious ego.
Envy and entitlement are literally forms of "reverse magic," in that they will spoil whatever they acquire. Envy may or may not help you get what you think you want, but it will also prevent you from enjoying it once you have it. Conversely, gratitude is both the cause and effect of spiritual awareness and contentment.
This lower vertical magic forms the basis of the leftist agenda, which is why they only become more bitter upon getting what they want. The bitterness of the left has not remitted one iota since prevailing in the 2008 election, because envy is an addictive way of life.
Leftism begins with the childish observation that the world is not perfect -- that it does not conform to their fantasies -- so that even things that work miraculously well must be attacked. Which only results in more problems that the leftist will decry and demand that the state remedy. If this downworld spiral is not arrested soon, it will eventually reach bottom.
In hermetic terms, the subtle rules the dense, and the deeper the effect, the higher the cause. The highest cause being God, aligning ourselves with this cause should, so to speak, lift us out of the closed circle of horizontality and manifest in our own lives in terms of the "subtle ruling the dense."
Now, this is not to say that the dense -- the horizontal -- can ever be wholly eliminated. We are not angels, which is to say, purely vertical beings. But it does mean that we can do our part to reverse the fall and restore the priority of the vertical over the horizontal. Obviously, if everyone did this -- individuals working on behalf of the universal -- we would have "heaven on earth," or a kind of earthly analogue of paradise.
On the other hand, "hell on earth" is the leftist agenda of the individual being forced to work on behalf of the (false) universal which is the state. For the true liberal, the individual is the true universal, not the collective.
Now, the first miracle recorded in Genesis is the archetype of all others, for as our Unknown Friend says, creation ex nihilo -- or out of nothing -- "is the highest possible expression of magic, namely divine and cosmic magic." This is why the primordial act of creation was not so much a bang as a blossoming seed. As he says, this is "not too difficult to imagine, because each little acorn is such a 'constructive bomb' and the oak is only the visible result of the slow 'explosion' -- or blossoming out -- of this 'bomb.'" What is a butterfly but an exploded worm -- or in our case, a buddhafly caterpultered from a christallus cocoon?
The seed has both a husk and kernel. The husk is there to protect the kernel, but it is possible that we can come to identify with the husk, thus defeating its purpose -- and the purpose of our lives -- by arresting the "blossoming explosion" of our true self. This blossoming -- once you begin to experience it -- is the "personal magic" that mirrors the magic of creation itsoph -- of God's unfolding, creative self-revelation. You too are a Big Bang.
The kernel, since it is internally related to the whole, seems miraculously able to draw the people and materials it requires in order to fulfill its mission. Or as a rabbinical expression puts it, "God spends most of his time arranging meetings and marriages."
Better stop now. Late for work....
Let's talk about miracles. According to Schuon, the phenomenon of miracles "has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term 'supernatural.'”
In other words, there is in any phenomenon a combination of both horizontal and vertical causes. Some things are almost all horizontal, while others -- we call them miracles -- are predominantly vertical. Thus, what appears supernatural on the horizontal or terrestrial plane is actually “'natural'” on the universal scale."
Scientists, of course, "confuse the miraculous with the irrational and the arbitrary," but Aristotle was correct in his outline of the four types of causation: material and efficient, which are horizontal; and formal and final, which are vertical. This is why scientists are baffled by anything that clearly manifests final causation, such as free will. Acknowledging final causation would destroy their faith in matter, so they attempt to explain it through material and efficient causes only, which ends in self-refuting absurcularity.
According to Tomberg, the seven miracles recorded in the Gospel of John "represent the healing of the seven principal infirmities of human nature in both individuals and groups." As such, they are "not just miracles," but "signs of the future spiritual and bodily healing processes within the human organism, which is sick as a consequence of the fall of humanity" (emphasis mine).
Please note that healing of any kind has a teleonomic aspect, in the sense that it is an attempt on the part of the organism to "return" to its archetypal form (which is always "above" in space or "ahead" in time).
Three orthoparadoxical statements come immediately to mind: 1) The kingdom of God is within [or among] you, 2) Seek ye first this kingdom, and 3) from the Gospel of Thomas, The Father's kingdom is spread all over the world, but the folks cannot see it. Hold these thoughts for later.
Just as the scientist can deny the miraculous, it is possible for the religionist to deny the mundane, so to speak. And he would be ontologically correct in doing so, although it would make functioning in the world difficult. I mean, someone has to grow the food, make the clothes, and take out the trash.
The point is, since verticality takes priority over horizontality, we could say that there is an "upper vertical" magic and a "lower vertical" magic (one is reminded of the observation that Isaac Newton was not the first scientist but the last magician).
Which is why signs and wonders are happening all the time -- i.e., the Father's kingdom is spread all over the world -- but the interventions are so subtle that we may underlook them, so to speak.
We may also fail to notice them because we can only scamper through one reality tunnel, and cannot see the other timetube that "might have been" in the absence of the vertical influence. It is not possible to conduct a double blind study on reality, which is why faith is unavoidable, whether secular or religious (e.g., Paul Krugman and other leftist economists have the faith that if only Obama had spent a few trillion more, the economy would be in great shape).
Of course, this is the great spiritual lesson of It's a Wonderful Life, which is about a man who spends his life selflessly aligning himself with the good, at great personal cost. However, in his case, he is shown the alternate reality that might have been had he spent his life pursuing only his egoic desires. Thus, he is able to understand that by acting so selflessly, he was actually socking away capital in a moral bank account that is "not of this world."
Another way of saying it is that George is granted the spiritual boon of a clear vision of all the miracles and magic that had occurred in his life as a result of unselfishly aligning himself with the Good.
And realizing this is the greatest miracle of all, for with this realization, the magic that had always been operating in his life bursts upon him like a sudden downpour of grace. What a tragic waste of life to miss the magic that is happening all the time, for this magic is precisely what nourishes the soul and feeds the "second birth." Living for others is a great liberation.
The same lesson is present in Dickens' Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge is first given a vision of the forces that went into exiling him from the greater reality and enclosing him in the cold world of his bitter and envious ego.
Envy and entitlement are literally forms of "reverse magic," in that they will spoil whatever they acquire. Envy may or may not help you get what you think you want, but it will also prevent you from enjoying it once you have it. Conversely, gratitude is both the cause and effect of spiritual awareness and contentment.
This lower vertical magic forms the basis of the leftist agenda, which is why they only become more bitter upon getting what they want. The bitterness of the left has not remitted one iota since prevailing in the 2008 election, because envy is an addictive way of life.
Leftism begins with the childish observation that the world is not perfect -- that it does not conform to their fantasies -- so that even things that work miraculously well must be attacked. Which only results in more problems that the leftist will decry and demand that the state remedy. If this downworld spiral is not arrested soon, it will eventually reach bottom.
In hermetic terms, the subtle rules the dense, and the deeper the effect, the higher the cause. The highest cause being God, aligning ourselves with this cause should, so to speak, lift us out of the closed circle of horizontality and manifest in our own lives in terms of the "subtle ruling the dense."
Now, this is not to say that the dense -- the horizontal -- can ever be wholly eliminated. We are not angels, which is to say, purely vertical beings. But it does mean that we can do our part to reverse the fall and restore the priority of the vertical over the horizontal. Obviously, if everyone did this -- individuals working on behalf of the universal -- we would have "heaven on earth," or a kind of earthly analogue of paradise.
On the other hand, "hell on earth" is the leftist agenda of the individual being forced to work on behalf of the (false) universal which is the state. For the true liberal, the individual is the true universal, not the collective.
Now, the first miracle recorded in Genesis is the archetype of all others, for as our Unknown Friend says, creation ex nihilo -- or out of nothing -- "is the highest possible expression of magic, namely divine and cosmic magic." This is why the primordial act of creation was not so much a bang as a blossoming seed. As he says, this is "not too difficult to imagine, because each little acorn is such a 'constructive bomb' and the oak is only the visible result of the slow 'explosion' -- or blossoming out -- of this 'bomb.'" What is a butterfly but an exploded worm -- or in our case, a buddhafly caterpultered from a christallus cocoon?
The seed has both a husk and kernel. The husk is there to protect the kernel, but it is possible that we can come to identify with the husk, thus defeating its purpose -- and the purpose of our lives -- by arresting the "blossoming explosion" of our true self. This blossoming -- once you begin to experience it -- is the "personal magic" that mirrors the magic of creation itsoph -- of God's unfolding, creative self-revelation. You too are a Big Bang.
The kernel, since it is internally related to the whole, seems miraculously able to draw the people and materials it requires in order to fulfill its mission. Or as a rabbinical expression puts it, "God spends most of his time arranging meetings and marriages."
Better stop now. Late for work....
Friday, December 03, 2010
I Am Who I Will Be, or What Has I Done For Me Lately?
We cannot understand what we really are unless we understand what we are capable of becoming --Robert Bolton
Well, duh. A human being cannot be limited, defined or contained by his past or by what he is at any given moment, but only by his developmental potential -- by his most mature and developed form, which is nonlocal -- in other words, archetypal -- not local. The soul is the form of the body, which carries a spacial connotation; but the soul also requires time in order to reveal its nature.
Thus, just as time is the moving image of eternity, we might say that our life is the moving image of our soul. Alert readers will have noticed that one of the powers of the B'ob is to channel the roaring torrent of O into the feeble stream of cyber-k. Do you see the connection? This blog is nothing more and nothing less than the local exteriorization of my nonlocal interior. It's got my grubby soulprince all over it.
But we could say the same thing of the collective experience of mankind, which has spent the last 40,000 years downloading and extruding various artifacts -- poems, plays, paintings, philosophies, theologies, symphonies, game shows -- that are the vapor trail of the soul's temporal sojourn.
And despite everything man has produced thus far, it is just a single grain of sand on an endless beach. Truly, the bleat goes on forever, whether we lileks or gnat.
The saint, the sage, the true artist of word, image or sound, each is respectively the highest embodiment of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. There are saints of knowledge, just as there are artists of truth and sages of beauty. In fact, to the extent that each transcendental fails to partake of the others, something vital will be missing. In other words, truth is the virtue of mind, just as virtue is beauty of soul.
The painorama of human evil is ultimately reducible to "the problem of increasing numbers of persons who lack power over their lives spiritually as much as materially, the two problems being closely related" (Bolton).
Well, duh. There is hardly a material problem without a spiritual cause and a spiritual solution, but the reverse is almost never true. For example, unscientific and simpleminded liberals like to pretend that "poverty causes crime," which is a smear of the so-called poor, the vast majority of whom are not criminals. Likewise, to suggest that poverty causes genocidal Muslims to think and behave as they do is simply an indictment of Islam.
The reason why leftism is an intrinsic psychopneumatic illness (and when I say this, I'm talking about the true believers, not the ordinary confused, apathetic, or misinformed citizen who votes Democrat) is that it represents the "opposite movement" of the cosmic procession of spirit.
In a way, it is "natural" for man to fall into such slavery and servitude. The problem is that for man, it is unnatural for him to be in a state of nature. Rather, he is made for transcendence, or he is nothing at all.
The left takes advantage of the fact that it has always been true that the majority of people will fall into servitude if left to their own devices. If liberty were natural to man, it would have appeared much sooner in history, not just a few hundred years ago.
Nor would half the population in the freest nation that has ever existed be working so hard to limit and roll back that freedom. "Natural man" will always take security in exchange for liberty. Only transnatural man can say "give me liberty or give me death," since only he knows that there is something higher than nature, and that there are certain worldly political arrangements that are not worthy of man.
Quite simply, it is difficult if not impossible to become what the Creator intended if one falls into the parallel looniverse of the left. Rather, one will be what the state intends one to be -- which is simply an anonymous cog in their horizontal machine. Rage all you want, but don't look at me.
True independence and individuation are marks of the spiritually mature, so long as one's prior dependence upon spirit is acknowledged and appreciated. Otherwise, the isolated individual is a monster, a mere caricature of uniqueness and wholeness. An original perhaps, but an original nothing -- creativity in service of death, vanity, and ego-aggrandizement. It is simply the opposite side of the same worthless material coin.
In the cosmic hierarchy, mysticism is above, material science down below. In between, linking these two, is the principial world of metaphysics, which has things in common with both, without being reducible to either. Materialism (or scientism), on the one hand, and new ageism and fundamentalism, on the other, are false paths which ironically share more in common than they diverge from one another. Ideology is always nourished by religious roots.
For example, the irrationalism of fundamentalism converges with the irrational ultra-rationalism of scientism, and both movements shun the higher intellect.
Likewise, while some traces of valid metaphysical thought may be found in the new age/integral movement, it is nearly always confused, partial, contradictory, idiosyncratic, self-serving, and certainly cut off from any kind of institutional grace, plus it is "out of contact with the historical roots of civilization" (Bolton).
Thus, it merges nicely with the modern material ego, which is why it is also almost always left wing. The new age and integral movements are riddled with mushheaded moonbats who keep deepakin' the chopra like a rented mule. In any event, both it and fundamentalism end up drifting "into becoming a part of the cosmic process [they] should serve to overcome" (ibid you adieu).
Well, duh. A human being cannot be limited, defined or contained by his past or by what he is at any given moment, but only by his developmental potential -- by his most mature and developed form, which is nonlocal -- in other words, archetypal -- not local. The soul is the form of the body, which carries a spacial connotation; but the soul also requires time in order to reveal its nature.
Thus, just as time is the moving image of eternity, we might say that our life is the moving image of our soul. Alert readers will have noticed that one of the powers of the B'ob is to channel the roaring torrent of O into the feeble stream of cyber-k. Do you see the connection? This blog is nothing more and nothing less than the local exteriorization of my nonlocal interior. It's got my grubby soulprince all over it.
But we could say the same thing of the collective experience of mankind, which has spent the last 40,000 years downloading and extruding various artifacts -- poems, plays, paintings, philosophies, theologies, symphonies, game shows -- that are the vapor trail of the soul's temporal sojourn.
And despite everything man has produced thus far, it is just a single grain of sand on an endless beach. Truly, the bleat goes on forever, whether we lileks or gnat.
The saint, the sage, the true artist of word, image or sound, each is respectively the highest embodiment of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. There are saints of knowledge, just as there are artists of truth and sages of beauty. In fact, to the extent that each transcendental fails to partake of the others, something vital will be missing. In other words, truth is the virtue of mind, just as virtue is beauty of soul.
The painorama of human evil is ultimately reducible to "the problem of increasing numbers of persons who lack power over their lives spiritually as much as materially, the two problems being closely related" (Bolton).
Well, duh. There is hardly a material problem without a spiritual cause and a spiritual solution, but the reverse is almost never true. For example, unscientific and simpleminded liberals like to pretend that "poverty causes crime," which is a smear of the so-called poor, the vast majority of whom are not criminals. Likewise, to suggest that poverty causes genocidal Muslims to think and behave as they do is simply an indictment of Islam.
The reason why leftism is an intrinsic psychopneumatic illness (and when I say this, I'm talking about the true believers, not the ordinary confused, apathetic, or misinformed citizen who votes Democrat) is that it represents the "opposite movement" of the cosmic procession of spirit.
In a way, it is "natural" for man to fall into such slavery and servitude. The problem is that for man, it is unnatural for him to be in a state of nature. Rather, he is made for transcendence, or he is nothing at all.
The left takes advantage of the fact that it has always been true that the majority of people will fall into servitude if left to their own devices. If liberty were natural to man, it would have appeared much sooner in history, not just a few hundred years ago.
Nor would half the population in the freest nation that has ever existed be working so hard to limit and roll back that freedom. "Natural man" will always take security in exchange for liberty. Only transnatural man can say "give me liberty or give me death," since only he knows that there is something higher than nature, and that there are certain worldly political arrangements that are not worthy of man.
Quite simply, it is difficult if not impossible to become what the Creator intended if one falls into the parallel looniverse of the left. Rather, one will be what the state intends one to be -- which is simply an anonymous cog in their horizontal machine. Rage all you want, but don't look at me.
True independence and individuation are marks of the spiritually mature, so long as one's prior dependence upon spirit is acknowledged and appreciated. Otherwise, the isolated individual is a monster, a mere caricature of uniqueness and wholeness. An original perhaps, but an original nothing -- creativity in service of death, vanity, and ego-aggrandizement. It is simply the opposite side of the same worthless material coin.
In the cosmic hierarchy, mysticism is above, material science down below. In between, linking these two, is the principial world of metaphysics, which has things in common with both, without being reducible to either. Materialism (or scientism), on the one hand, and new ageism and fundamentalism, on the other, are false paths which ironically share more in common than they diverge from one another. Ideology is always nourished by religious roots.
For example, the irrationalism of fundamentalism converges with the irrational ultra-rationalism of scientism, and both movements shun the higher intellect.
Likewise, while some traces of valid metaphysical thought may be found in the new age/integral movement, it is nearly always confused, partial, contradictory, idiosyncratic, self-serving, and certainly cut off from any kind of institutional grace, plus it is "out of contact with the historical roots of civilization" (Bolton).
Thus, it merges nicely with the modern material ego, which is why it is also almost always left wing. The new age and integral movements are riddled with mushheaded moonbats who keep deepakin' the chopra like a rented mule. In any event, both it and fundamentalism end up drifting "into becoming a part of the cosmic process [they] should serve to overcome" (ibid you adieu).
Thursday, December 02, 2010
On Taking Yes for an Answer
... yes I said yes I will Yes. --Shem the Penman
As we were saying a couple of days ago, a fellow "is free from some of the practical implications of morality only by identifying with the intelligible source from whence morality arises" (Bolton).
Incidentally, this is something we're really trying to emphasize in the moral development of Future Leader. That is to say, rather than transmitting the cosmic Law in wholly negative terms -- as a list of things he shouldn't do -- we're trying to foster an awareness of the plane from which virtue arises, i.e., the Good. So far, so Good, in that he's wonderfully empathic, caring, and well behaved, but in a spontaneous way, i.e., without being at all repressed.
Conversely, when I was a kit, the realm of morality was pretty much defined by NO!, but in reality, there is -- and must be -- an affirmative realm of YES! behind the NO! The lives of the saints teach us that abiding in the YES! can pretty much take care of the NO!, i.e., once the mind parasites and other impurities aren't dominant.
But for the average man who can't even control what he puts into his mouth, he requires the top-down NO! rather than the inside-out YES! to govern his appetites and impulses. (No wonder we see more and more legislation regarding food and tobacco.)
Which, by the way, is why our nation is being systematically undermined by the left, since the good man doesn't require all the thousands and thousands of coercive laws enacted by the left. He neither needs nor wants to be governed and micro-managed from without, which was how things stood in America prior to the unprecedented expansion of the state by Hoover and FDR. In freeing man from moral standards, the left simply imposes its own standards through the state (and extra-judicially through political correctness).
Once things that should be done spontaneously are demanded by law, the locus of moral control dissipates from the individual and is invested in the state; in other words, because people have less self-mastery, it is outsourced to the government.
Thus, for example, the majority of black children grow up without fathers, so paternal authority is just located downstream, in the judicial system (people with flesh-and-blood fathers generally don't require brick-and-mortar ones). Or, feminists who imagine they don't need men, just replace Daddy with an intrusive paternalistic state to care for them. This is why, as Dennis Prager says, "the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."
The Superior Man is free not just to do anything, but to do good, which is the only real freedom -- just as freedom to know truth can be the only real intellectual freedom.
Virtue is a kind of slavery that frees, which is a fine example of how Jew-Know-Who I AM conveyed universal principles in the form of light yokes and rustic paradoxables, so that their truth could be freely "discovered" rather than "imposed" from on high.
Among other things, this is one of the ways the secret protects itself. Which it does, an ontological fact to which our malodorous trolls provide smelloquent testimony. God never forces free will, nor does he grossly interfere with it.
Here is a key point -- call it a key of gnosis. Bolton writes that "Once it is realized that the everyday world depends on an unseen world with a reality of its own, values can be understood as the points at which this unseen world enters our awareness of the visible one, rather as the mountain tops of a submerged continent appear to us as islands" (emphasis mine).
This is a wonderful metaphor that applies to all of the transcendentals, i.e., the True, Good, Beautiful, Existence, and Unity. In each case, it is only known by virtue of its "piercing" through the phenomenal realm.
To put it another way, phenomena have a "metaphysical transparency" (Schuon) through which humans have constant access to the noetic Light in all its modes.
This is not speculation, but a very experience-near fact of moment-to-moment existence. If it were not true, we wouldn't even be animals, but something truly horrible. Most of the real damage in the world is caused by people without this awareness. Drained of spirit, the world becomes a preyground for predators.
Better yet, turn the image upside down, as with the Upanishadic Tree, with its roots aloft and branches down below. The branches and leaves pierce the world of maya from above; or, as I expressed it in the book, they take the form of little flowing springs of grace that dot the landscape. We encounter and drink from them every day, all day long.
Indeed, were it not for these springs, the world would truly be a barren, good-for-nothing wasteland, a literal prison, a gulag, a concentration camp, an income tax audit, a proctology exam, an MSNBC program, sharing a single bathroom with Rosie O'Donnell.
This is precisely where revelation, truth, love, beauty, and all the archetypes come into contact with, penetrate, and hijack this terrestrial plane. It is absurd to think that they randomly lojack us from "below." Let the dead bury the tenured. Ho!
This is also the area where we leave behind those worldly A-influences and come into contact with the transnatural B-influences. We must follow the B-influences back upstream to their source. This is obviously the meaning of the sacred river, whether it is the Ganges or in Revelation: And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
This source is prior to thought, the latter of which is down in time: it is up there by the pure headwaters of the eternal, by the fountain of innocence, next to the vantastic "garden misty wet with rain."
Oh yes, don't you remama? When she satya down in a crystal daze, toddling loose & lazy beneath a diamond sky with both hands waving free? No? Yes! I do. ¡Straight into the blisstic mystic, bright blazing fire and ecstatic cinder, Shiva, me tinders, count the stars in your eyes! --The Cosmobliteration of the Wholly Coonifesto
I guess that's enough for today....
As we were saying a couple of days ago, a fellow "is free from some of the practical implications of morality only by identifying with the intelligible source from whence morality arises" (Bolton).
Incidentally, this is something we're really trying to emphasize in the moral development of Future Leader. That is to say, rather than transmitting the cosmic Law in wholly negative terms -- as a list of things he shouldn't do -- we're trying to foster an awareness of the plane from which virtue arises, i.e., the Good. So far, so Good, in that he's wonderfully empathic, caring, and well behaved, but in a spontaneous way, i.e., without being at all repressed.
Conversely, when I was a kit, the realm of morality was pretty much defined by NO!, but in reality, there is -- and must be -- an affirmative realm of YES! behind the NO! The lives of the saints teach us that abiding in the YES! can pretty much take care of the NO!, i.e., once the mind parasites and other impurities aren't dominant.
But for the average man who can't even control what he puts into his mouth, he requires the top-down NO! rather than the inside-out YES! to govern his appetites and impulses. (No wonder we see more and more legislation regarding food and tobacco.)
Which, by the way, is why our nation is being systematically undermined by the left, since the good man doesn't require all the thousands and thousands of coercive laws enacted by the left. He neither needs nor wants to be governed and micro-managed from without, which was how things stood in America prior to the unprecedented expansion of the state by Hoover and FDR. In freeing man from moral standards, the left simply imposes its own standards through the state (and extra-judicially through political correctness).
Once things that should be done spontaneously are demanded by law, the locus of moral control dissipates from the individual and is invested in the state; in other words, because people have less self-mastery, it is outsourced to the government.
Thus, for example, the majority of black children grow up without fathers, so paternal authority is just located downstream, in the judicial system (people with flesh-and-blood fathers generally don't require brick-and-mortar ones). Or, feminists who imagine they don't need men, just replace Daddy with an intrusive paternalistic state to care for them. This is why, as Dennis Prager says, "the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."
The Superior Man is free not just to do anything, but to do good, which is the only real freedom -- just as freedom to know truth can be the only real intellectual freedom.
Virtue is a kind of slavery that frees, which is a fine example of how Jew-Know-Who I AM conveyed universal principles in the form of light yokes and rustic paradoxables, so that their truth could be freely "discovered" rather than "imposed" from on high.
Among other things, this is one of the ways the secret protects itself. Which it does, an ontological fact to which our malodorous trolls provide smelloquent testimony. God never forces free will, nor does he grossly interfere with it.
Here is a key point -- call it a key of gnosis. Bolton writes that "Once it is realized that the everyday world depends on an unseen world with a reality of its own, values can be understood as the points at which this unseen world enters our awareness of the visible one, rather as the mountain tops of a submerged continent appear to us as islands" (emphasis mine).
This is a wonderful metaphor that applies to all of the transcendentals, i.e., the True, Good, Beautiful, Existence, and Unity. In each case, it is only known by virtue of its "piercing" through the phenomenal realm.
To put it another way, phenomena have a "metaphysical transparency" (Schuon) through which humans have constant access to the noetic Light in all its modes.
This is not speculation, but a very experience-near fact of moment-to-moment existence. If it were not true, we wouldn't even be animals, but something truly horrible. Most of the real damage in the world is caused by people without this awareness. Drained of spirit, the world becomes a preyground for predators.
Better yet, turn the image upside down, as with the Upanishadic Tree, with its roots aloft and branches down below. The branches and leaves pierce the world of maya from above; or, as I expressed it in the book, they take the form of little flowing springs of grace that dot the landscape. We encounter and drink from them every day, all day long.
Indeed, were it not for these springs, the world would truly be a barren, good-for-nothing wasteland, a literal prison, a gulag, a concentration camp, an income tax audit, a proctology exam, an MSNBC program, sharing a single bathroom with Rosie O'Donnell.
This is precisely where revelation, truth, love, beauty, and all the archetypes come into contact with, penetrate, and hijack this terrestrial plane. It is absurd to think that they randomly lojack us from "below." Let the dead bury the tenured. Ho!
This is also the area where we leave behind those worldly A-influences and come into contact with the transnatural B-influences. We must follow the B-influences back upstream to their source. This is obviously the meaning of the sacred river, whether it is the Ganges or in Revelation: And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
This source is prior to thought, the latter of which is down in time: it is up there by the pure headwaters of the eternal, by the fountain of innocence, next to the vantastic "garden misty wet with rain."
Oh yes, don't you remama? When she satya down in a crystal daze, toddling loose & lazy beneath a diamond sky with both hands waving free? No? Yes! I do. ¡Straight into the blisstic mystic, bright blazing fire and ecstatic cinder, Shiva, me tinders, count the stars in your eyes! --The Cosmobliteration of the Wholly Coonifesto
I guess that's enough for today....
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Beaming Down from Dreamland without a Transporter Accident
Flaubert said that "writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful." Unless you're a leftist, in which case it is the opposite, resulting in a golden shower of tenurinary tracts from bladdering idiots who tell us it's raining.
While neuroscientists think of consciousness as the remembered present, there is another vital aspect of human consciousness which might be called the "unRemembered memory of the present," or what Bollas calls the "unThought known."
One of the reasons it is unremembered is that if we had to equally contend with the foreground and background of the present moment, we'd be too distracted to deal with the former. In reality, there can be no foreground in the absence of a background, and vice versa; conscious and unconscious are actually complementary, and in no way "opposites." They give rise to one another in a process of circular feedback.
This is why some people will give perfectly good money to a psychoanalyst in order to undertake a systematic exhumination of the background container of the present -- things we unconsciously recall but don't want to (or, more likely, that recall us), and that simply distort the moment and interfere with our happiness and fillfullment.
Just so, a collectivity is always more or less hindered by reminiscences that impede progress, and the more one believes oneself to be free of these irrational influences, the more influence they have. Hence, for example, the left's ubiquitous memories of paradise which they insist on imposing on the rest of us in the present. (Indeed, the general problem with Enlightenment rationalists is that they forget all about the endarkenment that operates outside linear logic.) Likewise, Islamists are haunted by unconscious recollections of which they are utterly blind and lacking in even a sliver of in-sight.
Without question, the larger part of memory -- the ocean, so to speak -- is not that which we recall, but that which recalls us. For example, every night we are "forgotten" by O, as we dissolve into the unconscious dreamworks, only to be re-collected and reconstituted in the morning. In this regard, it is somewhat analogous to being beamed down by the transporter each morning:
"A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then 'beam' it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). The term transporter accident is a catch-all term for when a person or object does not rematerialize correctly."
Indeed, perhaps you may have noticed that O is not (and could not be) entirely consistent in this regard -- that you might have had a little transporter accident overnight. It is as if the transporter left a few molecules out when it reassembled you in the morning.
Or to use a computer analogy, you're a little "buggy." One morning you wake up feeling this way, while the next morning you wake up feeling that way. Perhaps something is "missing," not some easily identifiable content, but again, more like the background context that would allow it all to make sense. Often the only "cure" is to go back to sleep and reboot. Sometimes death is perceived as the only way, hence, suicide.
Now, if there were seven days of creation, there must have been seven nights that were equally important -- perhaps we might even speak of the "seven dreams" of God, during which time the previous day's accomplishments were worked over and the next day's activities incubated.
The idea of the Creator having an "unconscious" has always appealed a bell in me. Since we are in his image, and a conscious mind is unthinkable in the absence of an unconscious mind, this must mean that God has some analogous dialectic. And in fact, I think Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead speaks to this reality, as do the distinctions between Being and Beyond-Being, nirguna and saguna brahman, or the ain sof / keter of kabbalah. (One could also look at Father and Son in this way.) Kataphatic theology applies to God, whereas apophatic theology applies to Godhead. Again, neither one is "superior," since both are not only required but inevitable.
Anyway, according to Tomberg, "Just as the full reality of human life consists of days and nights -- of the bright day-consciousness and the dark sway of the unconscious (or subconsciousness or superconsciousness) -- so the full reality of humanity's biography, the history of mankind, consists of a day aspect and a night aspect. The day aspect comprises the account of the actuality of that which has become, and the night aspect embraces the activity of becoming."
Another way of saying it is that there is horizontal history and vertical history, both individually and collectively. Each involves a different kind of causation. Horizontal causation may be linear or non-linear, but it operates from past to future. Let us call this the "causality of the day."
But vertical history does not ultimately operate on the basis of mechanical causation. Rather, it is guided organically and teleonomically by a goal, or what is called finalism. (It is also guided by certain perennial archetypes, thus there is formal causation as well.)
For example, a patient might come into psychotherapy imagining that there is some event or experience in their past that is causing their present troubles. If they can just remember and identify what it was and bring it into the light, then the vexatious pattern that is imposing itself upon their psychic life will be drained of its potential to cause problems.
But it only works that way in the movies. This is because the thing they're looking for is not in the past but right here in the present. It is not "behind" but "below," influencing things from the bottom up.
Furthermore, it doesn't work in a mechanical way, nor is it like the fabled "pressure cooker" of instinctual energy that needs to be released. Rather, it has a goal and an agenda of which we are unaware. We want one thing but it obviously wants another -- something very specific, usually a certain kind of relationship, even (or especially) if it brings pain or frustration. Neuropsychoanalytic research suggests that it is not a figure of speech to say that the left brain doesn't know what the right brain is doing (or worse yet, knowing or being).
One of the reasons liberal solutions don't work is that they fail to take into consideration the nocturnal mission of history. And one of the reasons they fail to do so is that leftism in general consists of a stagnant memepool of the over- and undereducated -- or maternalistic elites (the dreaded "vaginocracy dentata") and the losers for whom they know what's best.
Furthermore, this pathological dance of losers creates a "night time" influence of its own, in that the solutions and programs enacted by the elites have inevitable unintended consequences that make the problems worse, thus creating a greater need for maternalistic elites (a perverse alliance of men with breasts and women without them, e.g., feminists).
This is why one is sometimes tempted, as is Rush Limbaugh, to think that the damage inflected by the left must be intentional. I don't generally believe this. Rather, I believe that the majority of leftists have good intentions, but are honestly blind to their self-defeating ideas.
As Thomas Sowell has noted, liberal policies are guided by feeling -- in particular, a self-deluding "compassion" -- not by thought. As such, they never take into account what he calls "phase II," or unintended consequences of their policies. This is because their idiot compassion blinds them to the system of destructive incentives a policy puts into place.
Looked at collectively, this pattern is entirely self-defeating, just like a codependent patient who constantly complains about her husband, unaware that her codependency -- her narcissistic rescue fantasies -- prop up and fuel her husband's bad behavior.
But there is a great side benefit ("secondary gain") to the codependency, as it allows the woman to 1) project a damaged or devalued part of herself into her husband, thereby distancing herself from her own psychic pain, 2) feel contempt for, and triumph over, the weak and devalued part of herself, and 3) elevate herself and feel morally superior to him.
Thus, we should not be surprised if we see in leftists the same pattern of projection, condescension, and sanctimony. Indeed, where would the left be without their projected fantasies of the weak and dominated woman, or the po' hepless negro?
It is quite striking how blacks can tolerate the utter contempt that liberal politicians and the MSM have for them. They are infantilized, held to lower standards, excused of behavior that would not be tolerated in others, and worse. Only on the left could lowlife thugs such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson run for president without provoking comment, much less deep soul-searching. It is not ironic. It is inevitable.
But it takes two to tango to a tangle of pathology, and it is always tempting to overpathologize the abuser and underpathologize the abused, when the dysfunctional system needs both parties in order to function as a national rescue party -- to party heartily (or in the end, heartlessly). Just as sadists with their preydar are on the prowl for masochists, masochists are always on the lookout for sadists, driven to find their dissing half.
It reminds me of something a caller mentioned yesterday on Dennis Prager: "Tell a loser he's a winner and he'll fight for you. Tell him he's a god, and he'll kill for you."
While neuroscientists think of consciousness as the remembered present, there is another vital aspect of human consciousness which might be called the "unRemembered memory of the present," or what Bollas calls the "unThought known."
One of the reasons it is unremembered is that if we had to equally contend with the foreground and background of the present moment, we'd be too distracted to deal with the former. In reality, there can be no foreground in the absence of a background, and vice versa; conscious and unconscious are actually complementary, and in no way "opposites." They give rise to one another in a process of circular feedback.
This is why some people will give perfectly good money to a psychoanalyst in order to undertake a systematic exhumination of the background container of the present -- things we unconsciously recall but don't want to (or, more likely, that recall us), and that simply distort the moment and interfere with our happiness and fillfullment.
Just so, a collectivity is always more or less hindered by reminiscences that impede progress, and the more one believes oneself to be free of these irrational influences, the more influence they have. Hence, for example, the left's ubiquitous memories of paradise which they insist on imposing on the rest of us in the present. (Indeed, the general problem with Enlightenment rationalists is that they forget all about the endarkenment that operates outside linear logic.) Likewise, Islamists are haunted by unconscious recollections of which they are utterly blind and lacking in even a sliver of in-sight.
Without question, the larger part of memory -- the ocean, so to speak -- is not that which we recall, but that which recalls us. For example, every night we are "forgotten" by O, as we dissolve into the unconscious dreamworks, only to be re-collected and reconstituted in the morning. In this regard, it is somewhat analogous to being beamed down by the transporter each morning:
"A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then 'beam' it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). The term transporter accident is a catch-all term for when a person or object does not rematerialize correctly."
Indeed, perhaps you may have noticed that O is not (and could not be) entirely consistent in this regard -- that you might have had a little transporter accident overnight. It is as if the transporter left a few molecules out when it reassembled you in the morning.
Or to use a computer analogy, you're a little "buggy." One morning you wake up feeling this way, while the next morning you wake up feeling that way. Perhaps something is "missing," not some easily identifiable content, but again, more like the background context that would allow it all to make sense. Often the only "cure" is to go back to sleep and reboot. Sometimes death is perceived as the only way, hence, suicide.
Now, if there were seven days of creation, there must have been seven nights that were equally important -- perhaps we might even speak of the "seven dreams" of God, during which time the previous day's accomplishments were worked over and the next day's activities incubated.
The idea of the Creator having an "unconscious" has always appealed a bell in me. Since we are in his image, and a conscious mind is unthinkable in the absence of an unconscious mind, this must mean that God has some analogous dialectic. And in fact, I think Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead speaks to this reality, as do the distinctions between Being and Beyond-Being, nirguna and saguna brahman, or the ain sof / keter of kabbalah. (One could also look at Father and Son in this way.) Kataphatic theology applies to God, whereas apophatic theology applies to Godhead. Again, neither one is "superior," since both are not only required but inevitable.
Anyway, according to Tomberg, "Just as the full reality of human life consists of days and nights -- of the bright day-consciousness and the dark sway of the unconscious (or subconsciousness or superconsciousness) -- so the full reality of humanity's biography, the history of mankind, consists of a day aspect and a night aspect. The day aspect comprises the account of the actuality of that which has become, and the night aspect embraces the activity of becoming."
Another way of saying it is that there is horizontal history and vertical history, both individually and collectively. Each involves a different kind of causation. Horizontal causation may be linear or non-linear, but it operates from past to future. Let us call this the "causality of the day."
But vertical history does not ultimately operate on the basis of mechanical causation. Rather, it is guided organically and teleonomically by a goal, or what is called finalism. (It is also guided by certain perennial archetypes, thus there is formal causation as well.)
For example, a patient might come into psychotherapy imagining that there is some event or experience in their past that is causing their present troubles. If they can just remember and identify what it was and bring it into the light, then the vexatious pattern that is imposing itself upon their psychic life will be drained of its potential to cause problems.
But it only works that way in the movies. This is because the thing they're looking for is not in the past but right here in the present. It is not "behind" but "below," influencing things from the bottom up.
Furthermore, it doesn't work in a mechanical way, nor is it like the fabled "pressure cooker" of instinctual energy that needs to be released. Rather, it has a goal and an agenda of which we are unaware. We want one thing but it obviously wants another -- something very specific, usually a certain kind of relationship, even (or especially) if it brings pain or frustration. Neuropsychoanalytic research suggests that it is not a figure of speech to say that the left brain doesn't know what the right brain is doing (or worse yet, knowing or being).
One of the reasons liberal solutions don't work is that they fail to take into consideration the nocturnal mission of history. And one of the reasons they fail to do so is that leftism in general consists of a stagnant memepool of the over- and undereducated -- or maternalistic elites (the dreaded "vaginocracy dentata") and the losers for whom they know what's best.
Furthermore, this pathological dance of losers creates a "night time" influence of its own, in that the solutions and programs enacted by the elites have inevitable unintended consequences that make the problems worse, thus creating a greater need for maternalistic elites (a perverse alliance of men with breasts and women without them, e.g., feminists).
This is why one is sometimes tempted, as is Rush Limbaugh, to think that the damage inflected by the left must be intentional. I don't generally believe this. Rather, I believe that the majority of leftists have good intentions, but are honestly blind to their self-defeating ideas.
As Thomas Sowell has noted, liberal policies are guided by feeling -- in particular, a self-deluding "compassion" -- not by thought. As such, they never take into account what he calls "phase II," or unintended consequences of their policies. This is because their idiot compassion blinds them to the system of destructive incentives a policy puts into place.
Looked at collectively, this pattern is entirely self-defeating, just like a codependent patient who constantly complains about her husband, unaware that her codependency -- her narcissistic rescue fantasies -- prop up and fuel her husband's bad behavior.
But there is a great side benefit ("secondary gain") to the codependency, as it allows the woman to 1) project a damaged or devalued part of herself into her husband, thereby distancing herself from her own psychic pain, 2) feel contempt for, and triumph over, the weak and devalued part of herself, and 3) elevate herself and feel morally superior to him.
Thus, we should not be surprised if we see in leftists the same pattern of projection, condescension, and sanctimony. Indeed, where would the left be without their projected fantasies of the weak and dominated woman, or the po' hepless negro?
It is quite striking how blacks can tolerate the utter contempt that liberal politicians and the MSM have for them. They are infantilized, held to lower standards, excused of behavior that would not be tolerated in others, and worse. Only on the left could lowlife thugs such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson run for president without provoking comment, much less deep soul-searching. It is not ironic. It is inevitable.
But it takes two to tango to a tangle of pathology, and it is always tempting to overpathologize the abuser and underpathologize the abused, when the dysfunctional system needs both parties in order to function as a national rescue party -- to party heartily (or in the end, heartlessly). Just as sadists with their preydar are on the prowl for masochists, masochists are always on the lookout for sadists, driven to find their dissing half.
It reminds me of something a caller mentioned yesterday on Dennis Prager: "Tell a loser he's a winner and he'll fight for you. Tell him he's a god, and he'll kill for you."
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