Tuesday, August 07, 2012

The Nameforms that Bitch Birth and Dog Death

Just a little flutterblast, since I'm short on time.

To review: existence is not a fact. Rather, "if anything," it is "the non-fact of a disturbing movement in the in-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death" (Voegelin).

For some reason, a passage from Finnegans Wake just popped into my melon. I'll pass it along without comment, just in case it's relevant:

In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.

If the ensuance of existentiality is a movement, then this movement extends in different directions: in, out, up, down, forward, back, etc. I would suggest that our freedom -- human freedom -- is synonymous with the movement that is possible within this pregnant space, i.e., the womb of time.

Socrates says that the true philosopher -- the lover of wisdom and seeker after truth -- endeavors "to make a reasoned choice between the better and worse life, with reference to the nature of the soul" (in Kimball).

Better. Worse. Freedom. What else is there?

Well yes, there is ObamaWorld, which consists of Better and Coercion, or you'd better!, for short. There is "what Obama thinks" and "what you must do about it." In the one minute monument to mendacity he's running during the Olympics, he says it's fair to ask the wealthy to give a little more to the state. I agree. That's fair. Ask away!

Unfortunately, the Chicago Way involves "asking" with a gun to the head.

Note that the left always promises "emancipation" from this or that external circumstance, even while removing or constraining our real movement, e.g., "be tolerant of all points of view, or else!", or "we believe in relativism, absolutely." Every left wing "freedom" is purchased at the cost of chains that bind the recipient elsewhere and elsewhen. Who knows how much my son is going to end up owing Obama?

At any rate, within the fulsome space of subjectivity there are not only directions but dimensions. For example, as we have discussed on many occasions, dreaming takes place in a hyperdimensional space that is governed by non-Aristotelian rules of logic.

Likewise, the upper vertical -- the "spiritual dimension," as it were -- cannot be reduced to a four-dimensional space with external relations and linear causation.

Once one understands this, then much of the otherwise inexplicable phenomena that accompanies the spiritual life has a context in which it not only makes sense, but is somewhat "inevitable," given the total structure of things. (To be clear, the "possibility" of spiritual phenomena is inevitable, not this or that particular phenomenon.)

To put it another way, things happen -- they are necessary and/or possible -- because of principles. Spiritual events are possible because of spiritual principles, just as physical events are possible because of immaterial principles, e.g., the laws of physics, or of chemistry, or of plumbing, whatever.

A specialist in any field should have a grasp of the principles governing it, but this is usually not the case. Most people fail to articulate their principles, with the result that they are bound by implicit assumptions of which they are unaware. This ends up limiting the space of freedom mentioned above in paragraph two.

Actually, there are times that things happen because of an absence of principles. But enough about Harry Reid.

Besides, there is a larger principle at work in Harry the unrepentant pedophile, which is: no human good goes unpunished by the left.

To cite one obvious example of how implicit principles limit one's vertical freedom, every doctrinaire atheist begins with materialist assumptions which result, in machine-like fashion, in materialist conclusions. Thus, all the atheist "proves" is that he is a faithful materialist, but we knew that already. Frankly, such pseudo-reason is irreligulous.

Any kind of linear reasoning is, in a sense, a tautology: tenure in, garbage out. If the universe actually worked this way -- this way only -- then we certainly wouldn't be sitting here in this hyperdimensional womb of timenow, would we then?

Of poetry, Eliot wrote that it communicates "before it is understood" (in Kimball again). This is quintessentially true of the spiritual dimension, but it is also true more generally.

For example, this "pre-understanding" is what guides the scientist's intuition that this this or that that would be a more fruitful avenue of research (this sort of intuition is what distinguishes the grade A scientist from the worker B). It is as if there is tacit foreknowledge of an as-yet-undiscovered reality. Another word for this is "faith," i.e., "evidence of things unSeen."

If only we called things what they are, by their proper names!

And O how well & truly fucked / When first we feign to deconstruct!

Monday, August 06, 2012

The Answer and Its Perennial Search for Good Questioners

Next up in our threewheeling trialogue with Voegelin is an essay called Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History.

Wait! Don't go. It's really interesting.

The problem with Voegelin -- if I may be so impudent -- is that he seems to have been a bit isolated from normal chitchat with others. For example, although he spent his life in academia, I read somewhere that he accepted no graduate students, and instead focussed all of his time on research, writing, and the occasional lecture. I've known academics like this, and they can become so isolated that they start losing the ability to... to just GET TO THE POINT, WILL YOU!

This is distinct from the typical pseudo-intellectual masturbatory jargon that emanates from the jerk circles of the tenured. Rather, I compare it more to a musical genius such as Thelonious Monk, who penetrated so deeply into the foundations and architecture of music that he came up with a kind of private musical universe.

However, once one acclimates oneself to this new musical world, one finds that it is actually quite universal, traditional even. He may have discovered a new form of beauty, but in the end, beauty is beauty. Superficially it sounds "radical," but it's really a continuation; it is only radical in the literal sense of the term, which connotes a return to the "root" of things.

Another way of expressing it is furnished by Roger Kimball, who adduces the following quote from a Jean-François Revel: "The history of philosophy can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it."

FYI, we're living through the second phase.

Voegelin obviously falls into the first camp, which is why he isn't much discussed by those in the second. But since the vast majority of philosophers (and contemporary thinkers more generally) fall into the latter campf, it seems to me that he composed a lot of private music that few people have heard or take the necessary time to understand. Sure, it all makes sense to me. But the same people who dismiss Voegelin wouldn't even dismiss me, to put it moldily.

Kimball provides another helpful quote, this one from Henry Kissinger (BTW, even beyond the exceptional lucidity of thought, Kimball's essays have a wealth of brainiacal quotes and dozens of unfamiliar and sometimes even useful words such as "fustian," "minatory," and "purlieus"):

"We have entered a time of total change in human consciousness of how people look at the world. Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. You have to come to grips with who you are.... But now we learn from fragments of facts. A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can be brought up on the computer." But "information is not knowledge."

So to actually assimilate someone as deep as Voegelin -- or a world as deep as this -- one must form a real and vibrant relationship with him/it, meaning that there is a kind of two-way vector extending into his psyche and ours; or between (¶) and (¶).

And it seems to me that each side limits or expands the other. In other words, we can only "come to grips" with him to the same extent that we come to grips with ourselves. This is the nature of any vertical knowledge.

Horizontal knowledge, because it is merely objective, requires no such introspection, assimilation, or transformation, because it's analogous to placing an object -- a fact or bit of knowledge -- into the space of the mind and filing it away somewhere. The type of thinking that results is similar to a computer, in that it is mainly limited by the amount and speed of memory.

Voegelin is not the first author we have treated in this manner. Others we have spent weeks or months exploring have included Tomberg, Balthasar, Pieper, Eckhart, Ratzinger, Wojtyla, and, of course, Schuon. Again, these are not mere "books" but encounters. Absent the encounter, there is no way to access what is contained in the book, because it is contained in being, not knowledge (or, it is a different type of knowledge that reaches up and down into being, i.e., [n] vs. [k]).

One more quote, this one from Chesterton: "The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that 'faith is nonsense,' does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith."

Back to the essay alluded to above. One reason it interests me is that it confronts one of the problems addressed in the bOʘk, which is to say, the equivalence of experiences that use diverse symbols to describe them. Because the symbols differ, people may be misled into believing they are describing different realities. Or, the experiences may be reflections of a larger category: one person eats an orange, another an apple, but both have experienced fruit. (Oddly enough, yesterday reader Gandalin asked a question that touches on this very issue, even though this post was mostly written on Saturday.)

Voegelin writes that "What is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order" (emphasis mine). Too often, I believe, we either conflate symbols that are distinct, or else distinguish symbols that are roughly equivalent.

For example, the Allah of whom Islamists speak is obviously not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Conversely, Schuon maintained that Buddha had the experience of God even if he rejected the name. In a sense this is not controversial, in that every experience in O is going to be "unique" even though "universal."

How do we use symbols in such a way that they convey the universality without denying the uniqueness? Again, that's why I created my little family of pneumaticons: O, Ø, ʘ,(¶),(•),(•••),(↑),(↓), (o), (---), and all the rest. Based upon yesterday's thread, I need to come up with a symbol for vertical emissaries, i.e., angels. How about (¡). I like this, because our reaction to (¡) is often (!). I wonder if they also get a little freaked out? If so, (¿!).

You might say that there is a space element and a time element. The space element is more universal, the time element more particular. For example, one might say that the archetypal man -- Adam Kadmon -- is in "vertical space," while we each embody and elaborate the archetype in our temporal lives. Absent the latter, we have no access to the former. At the same time, Aquinas (and Augustine before him) would say that the archetype -- or idea -- is nowhere else other than in man, just as the blueprint is "in" the house and the DNA is in the cell it orders.

Voegelin criticizes the so-called philosopher who deforms himself "by adopting the belief that the truth of existence is a set of propositions" which are "demonstrably true and therefore acceptable to everybody." "In vain he will look for the one set of true propositions," for which reason we can "hardly blame him if in the end he decides that skepticism is the better part of wisdom and becomes an honest relativist and historicist."

Again, this is because, for example, if one merely examines outwardly the diverse symbols of religion -- instead of experiencing or "undergoing" them -- it is the work of a moment to dismiss them as incapable of universal assent. In reference to yesterday's thread, we might say that since people have different ideas about angels, they must not exist.

But ironically, it is the non-believer who exiles himself from any possibility of transcendent unity. For at least the believer holds passionately to the idea (or experience) of unity, even if he believes his symbol of unity is better than the other guy's symbol. Which it may well be. As in art, some works are better than others. It would be foolish on this basis to conclude that beauty doesn't exist.

That was Saturday. It is now Monday morning, and in the brief time I have left, I'd like to skip forward and add something that directly addresses yesterdays lofty thread, and illuminates my approach more generally. I'm not saying it is the right way, only that it works for me because I seem to be Built This Way. It's kind of a thread that has followed -- or organized -- me ever since my (¶) started to come on line in my mid-20s.

I don't know if I'll be able to find the exact passage I'm looking for, but in truth, it informs Voegelin's whole search for the Ground. For example, he writes that "The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason, whether Greeks or barbarians, have in a sense been Christians" (Augustine said the same thing).

It all begins with O and with (?!), or with Reality and the the shocking experience thereof. Voegelin writes that "man the questioner" is prompted "to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause of being.... in the act of questioning, man's experience of his tension toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer."

So, religion is already the answer to our prayers. The Torah, for example, chronicles centuries of engagement with, and experience in, O. One might say that it is the contrail of this ongoing engagement (although looked at another way, it is the vehicle itself).

"Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search." However, Man "can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... The answer will not help the man who has lost the question."

This reminds me of something Schuon said, to the effect that there is more Light in the intelligent question than in the deficient answer. For example, there is far more light in the question, "I wonder if this is all evidence of a higher intelligence?" than in the crude answer that it's all physics and Darwin. In a way, the Answer is always in search of a good question(er), because existence is not a fact, and neither are you.

What are we, then? For Voegelin we are a kind of "non-fact," a "disturbing movement in the in-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death." Thus, "the search... imposes a form even when the substance is lost."

Which is what often saves us in spite of ourselves.

I didn't really have time to find the passage mentioned above. I don't even have time to make sure all my words are properly misspelled. Obviously, to be continued if not beaten to death...

Friday, August 03, 2012

You Can't Handle the Truth. Or Freedom.

In the past we have discussed the "messiah" as understood by W.R. Bion. He used the word as a term of art to denote a general principle that operates across diverse domains, from psychology, to politics, to science, to art, and, of course, to religion.

The messiah is the one who upsets the established order based upon a new insight into, or contact with, the truth of being. As a result, the true messiah always clashes with the establishment, and things usually don't end well for him. Real messiahs have authority but little power. They attract but do not compel.

Conversely, it is as if the prince of this world holds open the door to the corridors of p. for the false messiah. For this knave, the skids are always greased and the action is always affirmative.

For example, the character of R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is an archetypal messiah who injects new life into the tyrannical, suffocating, and soul-crushing environment overseen by the controlling Nurse Rached.

Indeed, even McMurphy's initials -- RPM -- convey the idea of revolution, while "Rached" evokes the rachet, a tool with sharp teeth that permit movement in only one direction.

Thus, McMurphy and Rached exemplify the perennial duality of Slack <---> Conspiracy, or of O <---> Ø. For which reason it has always been in my top five religious films.

Looked at in this world-psychohistorical manner, all can agree that Jesus was a quintessential messiah; even if one doesn't regard him as the Messiah, he is nevertheless the most messianic figure in all of human history, for no one has upset the establishment more than he -- including, ironically, establishments that have attempted to contain and domesticate him.

(On the other side, we would probably nominate Marx for the honor of most destructive messiah, or MVP -- Most Virulent Pneumapath.)

In a very real way, Jesus -- or, let us say the Christ, or Word -- cannot be "organized," even though he must be; this requires a delicate balance, so veering too far in one direction or the other results in Error.

For this reason, it is valid to speak of the eternal complementarity of the Church of Peter and Church of John, even though they are, and must be, the same Church.

Dostoyevsky famously depicted the conflict between messiah and establishment in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor, who arrests Jesus and lets him know that his services are no longer needed. Frankly, he has become a nuisance and just gets in the way:

"[T]he Inquisitor thinks that Jesus has misjudged human nature. He does not believe that the vast majority of humanity can handle the freedom which Jesus has given them." Rather, the grazing multitude must be guided by a vanguard of elevated souls advanced enough "to take on the burden of freedom."

Sound familiar? As I said, it pervades politics. You can't handle the freedom. Let Obama, or Justice Roberts, or Rahm Emanuel, or Mayor Bloomberg, or Harry Reid, or the Chick-Fil-A douche handle it for you. And even without such ratchet-wielding assouls, we also have several protective layers of political correctness to twist people in the necessary direction.

The Inquisitor advances his argument "by explaining why Christ was wrong to reject each temptation by Satan. Christ should have turned stones into bread, as men will always follow those who will feed their bellies."

In the vertical, breaking news from 30AD is still breaking in 2012. Only the names have been changed.

Anyway, Voegelin discusses the messiah principle in his own way, writing that "Every prophet, every philosopher, every enlightened person like a Buddha, a Confucius, a Lao-tse with his doctrine of the Tao, the way, comes as an element of disorder in his society, because he has received an insight into the true order, which is different from the established order.

"Thus, every new insight into order is the beginning of a revolution of more or less considerable dimensions."

As you can see, for the establishment, salutary order will always appear as dangerous and threatening disorder. This is why, for example, the left sees the properly ordered people of the Tea Party as disordered, and the disordered (to put it mildly) children of OWS to be rightly ordered. But only one of these movements can be messianic in nature, because only one of them is organized around a genuine insight into the true order.

We don't see too many political ads here in California, since the state is so deeply disordered that it is considered to be in the bag for Obama. But last night I saw an Obama ad while watching the Olympics. In it he properly notes that we all have a big decision to make in the forthcoming months, one that transcends both candidate and party. Rather, this is a choice between "two very different plans for our country."

Correct, as far as it goes. What he really means is that we have a choice between two different orders, or between order and disorder. In turn, this choice is rooted in the very nature of things.

Our founders had a deep insight into this order, and weaved it into the foundational law of the land.

In other words, it is the purpose of the Constitution to preserve the messianic insight of those who simultaneously declared our independence from tyrants, and our dependence upon the Source without whom our rights are as alienable as the state wants them to be. This is a gift for which we can never hope to repay them, unless it is by preserving it -- in all its explosiveness -- for unborn generations, as they did for us.

But if the founders were to somehow turn up at his door, Obama would undoubtedly school them on the error of their ways -- after all, he is, unlike them, a Constitutional Scholar -- and let them know that the vast majority of Americans cannot handle the freedom they bequeathed to them, and that these feckless incompetents require a vanguard of elevated souls who are wise enough to take on the terrible burden of freedom.

Don't worry. It's covered under Obamacare:

The Nurse will see you now:

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Your Passport to the Promised Land

Yesterday we introduced the idea of the vertical interior exodus, or "esodus," for lack of a better term. I already don't like it. Let's just call it (↑).

For Voegelin, Augustine formulated the problem in a way that has never been surpassed, probably because it cannot be.

This makes sense, for just as God -- O -- is by definition the ultimate category, movement toward O -- (↑) -- would have to be considered the "ultimate activity," so to speak, of existence, since neither can it be surpassed (although one may proceed faster or slower, and passing is allowed on the right).

Augustine writes that within the soul there are two "organizing centers," which he calls "love of self" and "love of God." And "between these two centers there is continual tension: man is always inclined to fall into the love of self and away from the love of God."

Thus, "Exodus is defined by St. Augustine as the tendency to abandon one's entanglements with the world, to abandon the love of self, and turn toward the love of God" (Voegelin). This is "a movement of the heart," a "departure from Babylon" (Augustine).

In terms of chaos theory, we might think of these as as a kind of bivalent phase space of subjectivity in the familiar "crazy-cOOneye," drunken TOOts, or infinity pattern, like so:

It could also be symmbolized O <---> Ø.

Again, for human beings, it is the in-between that counts. We must tolerate this tension, for it is where "new insights into order occur." In turn, these insights give direction and pattern to the vertical exodus.

Outside this tension, "progress" of any kind would be literally inconceivable, for one would either be plunged into the nescience of Ø or into the omni-science of O. Not for nothing does Moses "see" the promised land but never arrive there. If he had, then world history would have ended right then and there.

So "the tension between the established order and the new insight yields a new order of higher validity"; and it is "higher" because closer to O. However, we can never "see" the closeness per se; rather, we can only harvest the fruits of the insight, so to speak.

Analogously, imagine a pre-scientific people that stumbles upon a superior method of agriculture. They have no idea how it works. All they know is that if they keep doing it, they have a more abundant yield. I think this accounts for a certain tendency in religion for ritual to devolve to what amounts to obsessive-compulsiveness.

We'll discuss this in more detail later, but elsewhere Voegelin speaks of how religious symbols -- which are intended to memorialize and engender experiences in O -- may gradually become metaphysically "opaque," and fail to do the job. In a sense, we might say that the tension between O and Ø is lost, and O becomes "contained" by the latter.

This is the well-known problem of the spirit being vanquished by the letter, Word by words, pnuema by pnuemababble. It is also what permits one to deepak one's chopra before the spiritually naive. Walk on hot coals and Unleash the Power Within!, and all that. Such charlatans always promise some magical way to collapse the tension between O and Ø.

Think I'm exaggerating? In his latest assault on grammar, the windi hindi attempts to explain why we aren't immortal, and how we might become so via Good Thoughts:

"The human body consists of hundreds of billions of cells that function perfectly, and if we were single-celled creatures, immortality would be normal." As you can see, he has no idea whatsoever what the word "immortality" means. He also inverts the cosmos, placing algae above human beings. He is half right, of course, since some human beings do fall beneath the level of innocent amoebas.

Back to the †ension and its alternatives. Voegelin points out that for most people, since they don't consciously think about it, it is "objectified by various imageries" or "depicted in very definite colors and incidents."

This is especially problematic for the two-dimensional atheist who has no intuitive feel for scripture, and approaches it more literally than the most abject literalist, i.e., "the world is not 6,000 years old, so God does not exist. QED."

Here is where a great deal of mischief arises, because man has been known to try to eliminate the Tension in ways that are extremely destructive.

There are really two principle ways to accomplish this. The first is much less harmful, as it posits a kind of nonlocal existence beyond this world (e.g., moksha, nirvana) through which one may inscape via egobliteration. There are a number of problems with this approach, one being that you can spend your whole life sitting on a pillow meditating, and achieve nothing. Conversely, if you are successful, you also achieve nothing.

The second type is far more dangerous to the collective. It encompasses "the modern apocalyptic visions of the perfect realm of reason, the perfect realm of positivist science in the Comtian sense, or the perfect realm of Marxist Communism" (Voegelin).

Notice that the political religions of the left always appeal to the "pain," so to speak, of the Tension, and offer a promise of release from it. They have a special insight into the cause and cure of this fruitful tension.

The cure is simultaneously prosaic and sterile -- like Deepak's words above, or Obama's words whenever -- but pernicious in the extreme, for the same reason that it would be dangerous for a physician to pretend to vaccinate people with a fake vaccine. The physician looks for all the world like a genuine healer, and yet, is covertly assuring the spread of disease and disorder.

I need to wrap this up. Let's just say that there is no horizontal cure for existence, because human existence is an orientation in being and not a disease to be overcome.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Exodus and Esodus

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that it would probably take six months for me to explicate everything that has been provoked by my encounter -- and it is an encounter -- with this single book of essays by Voegelin. Some of my recent posts are based on only a sentence or two, so it's been slow-going. And even then, I'm only hitting the personal highlights.

I'm tempted to dilate on the meaning of such evocative "richness," since the vast majority of prose is safely dead before it even soils the page. But I think I'll just move on to the next chapter, which is called Configurations in History -- of which one might well ask: "are there any? Or do we simply conjure and superimpose a bunch of likely stories over the riot of the past, and try to squeeze timepast into a teapot?"

Whatever history is, human beings are without a doubt in it, if not fully of it. Which is why, for example, political campaigns spend millions of dollars in the effort to convince us to accept one historical narrative over another.

Obama's stenographers in the MSM, for example, desperately wish for us to believe that Romney's recent journey to Europe and the Middle East was a gaffe-ridden disaster instead of a righteous pimp-slap to Dear Leader. Once one bows before the narrative, the facts take care of themselves. Some appear out of nowhere, like a ghostly electron in a quantum field, while others vanish in the same way.

Come to think of it, Bohr's complementarity principle might be fruitfully applied to historiography, in that the past essentially consists of a kind of infinite field that has no pattern until we consciously observe it.

But clearly, no person could ever access "the" total pattern of history, any more than he could understand the total economy -- or even the totality of his own mind. The only exception to this would be revelation, i.e., a vertical memo from "outside" or "above" the system.

Among other barriers, history is obviously still happening, and it is impossible in principle to understand the meaning of a process until it is completed.

Indeed, Voegelin cautions us that "if any present solution to problems is taken in a doctrinaire manner, as giving the ultimate truth about history, this is one of the gravest misunderstandings possible" (emphasis mine). Why so grave? For starters, there are about 100 million graves from the 20th century that stand as mute testimony to the gravity of such doctrinaire "solutions." It takes a lot of human eggs to make a leftist omelette.

Socrates' famous wise crack about "knowing thyself" is of course sound and timeless advice. But like all other kinds of knowledge (as discussed in yesterday's post), we can only know ourselves at all because we cannot know ourselves completely. But someone must know us, or self-knowledge would be inconceivable.

Could history have the same structure? Yes, but only for the believer, who is indeed vouchsafed an intuition of the total meaning of history, for as Christ is "Word made flesh," he is also, and quintessentially, "future made present." This doesn't mean that history stops per se -- a common misunderstanding of the first generation of believers -- but that the end is "present," so to speak, and accessible within time.

So history is obviously "incomplete," since it "extends into an unknown future." And yet, via such modalities discussed in yesterday's post -- e.g., faith, hope, and love -- we hail the future from afar with a kind of ontological confidence that the unbeliever can only match with either hypocrisy or a comforting fairy tale.

Speaking of escapes -- and inscapes -- from reality, Voegelin focuses on one particular category of history that has dominated the West, exodus. Generally speaking, "When a society gains a new insight into the true order of personal and social existence, and when it [abandons] the larger society of which it is a part when it gains this insight, this constitutes an exodus."

This pattern may be traced back to father Abraham, who embarked upon "the first formal exodus of which we have any knowledge."

Is that true? Yes, in a mythopoetic or "deep historical" way. But there were also a number of purely anthropological or even "Darwinian" exoduses prior to that, for example, the exodus from the trees to the open savannah, or the exodus out of Africa 100,000 years ago, give or take.

More recently there was the American exodus from Europe, which was indeed based upon "a new insight into the true order of personal and social existence," i.e., that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

This wasn't a new insight per se, but the first time a human group broke off from the larger society of which it was a part, and explicitly defined itself in this manner. For this very reason, Jefferson suggested a design for the Seal of the United States depicting the children of Israel being led out of the larger society of Egypt based upon their own "new insight" into the nature of reality and a fabulous recipe for cheesecake.

This pattern has a more general continuity with natural selection, out of which new species are supposed to emerge based upon geographical, behavioral, and/or temporal separation and isolation from the main group.

I can only speak for my own species, but this is certainly how Raccoons emerged, via intellectual and spiritual separation -- what we call exodeus -- from the larger group. Which would also explain my tiny select readership.

Because of our evolutionary divergence, Coon food is inedible for most humans (it causes severe gas, from what I've been told), whereas we couldn't last two weeks on a strict diet of typical human food offered by the MSM or grown by tenured subsistence farmers in the parched groves of academia.

Supposing one has a new insight into the true order of reality, what is one to do? First of all, "there is always the question whether to emigrate from the present order into a situation in which the new order can become socially dominant..." The South, for example, decided to found a new confederacy based upon the insight that it is good for one man to own another. But was it true? No, that would be impossible, for if all men are created equal, it is not possible that some men are born in chains.

Meanwhile, what was once an exodus -- an exterior phenomenon -- has now become an... what would be word? Esodus, I suppose. This is convenient, because in certain ways it parallels the important distinction (but not separation) between exoteric and esoteric religiosity, or outer and inner, respectively.

At any rate, "The completion of this idea occurs in Christianity, in which this conception of the exodus has become a fundamental catagory..." (Voegelin).

Way out of time. To be continued...

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