Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Wise Men From the Yeast

It happens every other October: I wait until the last minute to complete my (dis)continuing education units. Therefore, I'll be at an all-day seminar tomorrow, which means the world suffers another 24 hour setback in the progress of cosmic evolution. In other words, no posting.

I'm very discriminating about the seminars I attend. I always make sure they are the absolute cheapest, regardless of topic, being that it is my custom to bring earplugs and a book and hunker down in the back of the room. Similar to when I was in college.

Tomorrow's seminar is called The Habits of Happy People, so if I hear any helpful tips, perhaps I'll LIVE TWEET them. Yes, INSTANT HAPPINESS, while you wait.

I guess I'm a little curious to find out whether the speaker will discuss the classic views on happiness, or whether it will be nothing but postmodern pneumababble. We shall see. But I don't see how a human can possibly be happy in the absence of religion, unless he's very stupid or very high.

And not just any religion, because most religions are rather bleak, e.g., Islam and Buddhism. A world unleavened by the Christian message is a pretty dark and depressing place, especially for atheists.

I recently had this experience in reading a book on the history of war that ranges from the pre-hominids to the post-human monsters of the left, e.g., Hitler, Mao, Stalin, et al. The book is called War and Civilization, and indeed, you could almost say that "war" and "human being" are synonymous: where one is, so too is the other. It is a depressingly naturalistic view of man, completely devoid of spiritual uplift.

So, as a kind of antidote (I hope), I just ordered a book called History in His Hands, which covers the same ground, but from the divine-human angle. I saw the author on The Journey Home on EWTN, which is without a doubt my favorite television program. I must have seen about 25 episodes, and nearly all are quite compelling (speaking of the search for happiness).

To the extent that Christianity fails to transmit joy above all else, then somebody goofed. Chesterton was very good on this point. In his The Everlasting Man, he speaks of the "unfathomable sadness" and pessimism of the pagan world, adding that "I doubt if there was ever in all the marvelous manhood of antiquity a man who was as happy as St. Francis was happy."

When we speak of the "leavening" of Christianity, that's what we're talking about: it occurs not just in the individual but in the culture and in history at large. It is the reason why America has always been the most optimistic nation -- and why it was of such world-historical consequence that we elected this bilious bonehead in 2008. Could the contrast with Reagan be more extreme?

Every doctrine has a method: in the case of Platonism, the method is up, out, and gone: "an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone" (Chesterton). It is what any atheist or materialist in his right mind would do -- that is, if he carries his depressing premises through to their suicidal conclusion: if the world is absurd, why participate?

Balthasar says much the same thing -- and not at all disrespectfully. For Plotinus, for example, the world itself is a fall from the One, so no salvation is to be found in it.

This is the polar opposite of the Judeo-Christian stream, in which the creation is fundamentally good, the very sensorium of our salvation. I would say that this is because time is "renewed" by grace instead of being just a meaningless circle or a less-than-meaningless descent into entropy. Grace is what renders time negentropic. We are not so much dropped into time as suspended there by a nonlocal thread that proceeds from the top.

We are... I've always liked how Harry Nilsson put it. He may not have been anyone's idea of a Christian, and yet, he was leavened just the same:

“Late last night, in search of light, I watched a ball of fire streak across the midnight sky. I watched it glow, then grow, then shrink, then sink into the silhouette of morning. As I watched it die, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot in common with that light.’ That’s right. I’m alive with the fire of my life, which streaks across my span of time and is seen by those who lift their eyes in search of light to help them though the long, dark night.”

Or in Song of the Stars, by Dead Can Dance,

We are the stars which sing / we sing with our light... Our light is a voice / We make a road for the spirit to pass over

And every light has a source.

Monday, October 06, 2014

Cosmic Podiatry

I think it's appropriate to pause a moment and reflect on ten nine years of the One Cosmos blog, what with a seemingly endless trail -- or blockade, depending on your point of view -- of posts extending back to October 2005:

Okay, that's enough. No need to get maudlin. Back on your heads!

Hey, that image looks familiar! Must be from that series of posts we did on the Divine Comedy a few years back. Being that the goal of this blog has always been to write things with no expiration date -- or no possible relevance, depending on your point of view -- might as well repost it today, because I'm short on time:

We're finally up to the canto we've all been waiting for, in which Deepak Chopra gets his just desserts. For this is the valley of rapacious brutes who debauch themselves for gold -- who distort spiritual reality by treating it as a profane thing to be bought and sold.

Folks here are buried head first up to the knee with their feet exposed, the soles of which are on fire. Strange image. I wonder what Dante had in mind?

Upton writes that the souls here "are buried in an inverted position because they have inverted the spiritual hierarchy."

As we know, the principial world (the world of metacosmic principles) is like an inverted tree, with its nonlocal roots above and its convenient local branches down here below.

Therefore, the inverted position of these vulgar simoniacs (one who practices simony) is simply an image of what they inverted -- and perverted -- in life. Thus, their feet, which symbolize the terrestrial world, are at the top, while their heads, which symbolize the celestial, are at the bottom. This reveals their true values and motives, which cannot be hidden from God.

This brings to mind what may be my favorite letter of Meditations on the Tarot, The Hermit. The hermit is a properly right side-up man, and for this reason will appear upside-down to the worldly. This blog is proudly upside-down, and always will be. We're here, we're queer, and we're not going away.

Such a man does not deny the world but sees it -- and its contents -- in its proper perspective and order. He does not place what is both priceless and of urgent importance above what is ephemeral and insignificant. Which is why The common man lives among phantasms; only the recluse [i.e., hermit] moves among realities (Aphorisms of Don Colacho). Now, there was an invert!

Furthermore, the hermit is the cosmic locus of the synthesis of heaven and earth, i.e., their union, not polarization. He represents the harmony of intellect, emotion, and will; or mind, heart, and strength.

But again, such a man will appear upside-down to the hypnotized mob and tenured rabble, for Modern society works feverishly to put vulgarity within everyone’s reach (DC), and largely succeeds now that so many of us attend college, those somnambulant secular seminaries of factsimian sophistry.

For the properly spiritually oriented man, his soul is on fire and God is the water. But in this vale of hell, the soles are on fire and there's no water to be found. Dante also notices that the fire flickers back and forth between the heel and toes. Upton suggests that this is another inverted image, this one of the purifying spiritual fire, since in Hell it moves horizontally rather than vertically.

In a foot note, Upton reminds us of the spiritual hucksters who charge good money to teach idiots how to walk barefoot on hot coals. I always suspected that Tony Robbins was a preview of hell.

The valley of the hotfoot is also a parody "of the baptismal font," in that these sinners "are horribly baptized by the fire of the Holy Spirit they sought to buy and sell" (Upton).

But the Divine Fire is not a plaything. To imagine that one can control it sufficiently to truck and barter in its activation is about as wise as selling nuclear secrets to Islamists. In the long run you end up with the Agni but no ecstasy.

In the next valley it gets even hotter, for it is the vale of the spiritual pundits, the magicians and diviners who "impiously sought to pierce the veil of the future" (Upton). These people cause much more mischief than you might imagine, for they are spiritual prometheans whose reach exceeds their grasp -- or whose mental being surpasses what they have properly assimilated and actualized spiritually. They are engaged in the dangerous practice of driving in front of their headlights; in other words, they are operating in the dark, with mere knowledge (k) in front of being (n).

Therefore, in this valley of hell they are perpetually facing backward. Once again it is an inverted image of how they functioned in life; in being turned backward, they remind us "of a 'vanguard' cadre in politics or an 'avant-garde' movement in the arts, which, after a few years, turns out to be totally reactionary; their attempt to conquer the future binds them to the past" (Upton).

Speaking of timely.

Is there anyone more nauseatingly predictable and reactionary than the political "progressive" or artistic "transgressive"? Even the word "progressive" implies an ability to see into the future. But when their future arrives, it is always an atavistic hell. Obama does not look forward but backward, to Jimmy Carter, LBJ, FDR, and the whole failed history of illiberal collectivism and statist coercion. Likewise the public employee unions for whom it is always 1900, or liberal blacks for whom it is always 18th century South Carolina, or feminists for whom all reality is one big Daddy Issue.

And of course, such people are not only looking backward but down, toward the lowest rung of the cosmos. No one pretends that the unions are fighting for any ideal except for their own material gain. But in the words of Don Colacho, there is no faster way to corrupt an individual than to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses. Such an assoul is upside-down, inside-out, and assbackward.

Hey, it's a Tony Robbins seminar, and it will only cost your soles!

Friday, October 03, 2014

Who Was that Unmasked Man?!

Since we're on the subject of time, here is a timely aphorism of Don Colacho: Time should be feared less because it kills than because it unmasks.

Think of how this dreadful truism applies to Dear Leader, Mr. Bequeath Ebola, who, of course, promised "change." Now, change is obviously the essence of time, but a progressive is someone who believes time has a kind of automatic direction, and yet, no telos, no fixed orientation.

Therefore, the kind of change that is championed by progressives is almost guaranteed to result in a grotesque unmasking of the unredeemed man, i.e., the beast that man becomes in the absence of conformity to what transcends him. After all, deterioration is change. One might say that change in the absence of God is just slow-motion death. Or maybe you don't read the news.

So, Obama has been unmasked over the past six years, as have his decroded "people." And I suppose the fact that some 40% still support him proves that they still see the old mask firmly in place. I actually know people who are like this.

The other day, one of them spoke to me of the stunning success of ObamaCare. Not only is he enclosed in the left's alternate reality, but his only knowledge of conservative ideas is filtered through its hateful ignorantsia, so he is programmed to reject reality a priori -- the same way you might react if someone said to you, "Yes, but Hitler wrote that..."

Progressives believe it is possible to determine truth via calendar, hence the belief that they must be on the right side of history. But history has no "side" unless it is in reference to what surpasses history, AKA God. Otherwise history is just history: it has an opaque front and cloudy back, but no periphery.

There is of course a positive unmasking, and this is what we call "metanoia," or conversion, or repentance.

Conversely, you could say that Adam was the first human to put on the mask, for which reason God -- no doubt ironically -- asks "Where are you?" Adam responds that he heard God's voice, became frightened, and "hid myself," i.e., put on the mask to fool God. Good luck with that.

To paraphrase Schuon -- and this is a real orthoparadox -- man is the only creature who is free to defy or contradict his own nature. In California, Governor Brown recently signed a law mandating that children who are confused about their sex are "free" (!) to choose either locker/bathroom. Yes, the left is beyond parody, beyond Orwell, beyond my powers of insultainment.

Even so, time eventually unmasks, no matter how much plastic surgery. Alternatively, we can stop the pretentious charade and just unmask ourselves before time does the job for us.

One of the reasons why the left must legislate so much insanity is to prevent the unmasking that would occur in the absence of force. For example, in the absence of state-mandated racial discrimination, time would unmask some uncomfortable truths about race and IQ.

Now interestingly, unmasking ourselves is an exercise in freedom, whereas time's unmasking is under the force of necessity -- the latter is against our omnipotent wishes.

But the self-unmasking -- i.e., reverse auto-pullwoolery -- takes place "outside time," or it is a kind of exit from profane time. Balthasar writes that the "timelessness which the beloved object [God] bestows on the person who chooses it" is at the same time an expansion of the freedom of the person who so chooses.

Wha?

Yeah, you could say this is the eternal "day of creation," or fiat lux. Balthasar speaks of "the ever-increasing mutual penetration of these two elements, which were 'created in the beginning' as 'heaven and earth.'"

A Raccoon believes -- well, this Raccoon, anyway -- that Christ appears as the creativity-freedom principle in history. He is simultaneously God unmasked and man unmasked -- "naked" but not ashamed, glorified but humble.

"Here the mystery of the time-transcending origin appears as the total Christ.... The world and its falling away were created for the sake of this origin and this goal," which "surpasses and at the same time justifies time" (ibid.).

Thus, this final unmasking is the "vertical resolution of the whole structure of time, and hence of history..." The irritating abyss of time -- which is a measure of our distance from God -- is bridged by the divine creativity-in-love which, from our side, invites us to free ourselves of the disguises we wear to try to elude the decrosion of time -- the very same time that ruins everybody's lives and eats all our steak.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

A Day in the Life of God: Three Chords Good!

Another problem I have with divine omniscience as usually understood is that it is as if the three modes of time -- past, present, and future -- are reduced to the past only.

Think about it: if events are determined, then it is very much as if everything has already happened. What then, is the point of time? Present and future become oddly superfluous -- inexplicable, really. There can be no "point" to anything, because there is nothing toward which to point.

Einstein agreed that the existence of the now is just a mirage: he "completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a single existence."

Upon the death of a dear friend, Einstein wrote the family and assured them that his death "was of no consequence, 'for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.'"

Well, that's comforting. Why bother with priests and psychologists when one can consult with a psychophysicist or physicotherapist? But as we all know, when it comes to common sense, Albert was no Einstein.

This illustrates the larger fallacy of trying to explain away the concrete human world for some abstract and experience-distance one. This is what all ideologies do, and unfortunately, it is possible for religion to yield to the ideological temptation.

Indeed, this is one reason why I would say Christianity is a cure for religion, for the simple reason that it is impossible -- or should be, anyway -- to reduce a person to an ideology. If you place person at the top, then any abstraction must be in the service of concrete personhood, not vice versa.

(And we might parenthetically add that Jews are covered here by the I AM; by way of contrast, Allah is the YOU DO OR ELSE!, while Buddhism is the YOU AREN'T AND NEITHER AM I. The New Age god is ANYTHING GOES because I AM S/H/IT.)

Now, none of this means that I am right. It only means that people who disagree with me are fools or knaves.

I am not a literal Whiteheadian, but rather, just plunder what I need from him. And one of his central points is that time matters, not just in an abstract sense, but quite concretely, in the manner in which we experience it. For him, our experience of time is something of an analogue of the very structure of the cosmos, for the cosmos is a process of coming into being (whatever that is) and fading into the past (whatever that is) -- just like our experience of time.

In the book for which the blog was named ten years ago this month, I sheepishly suggested that our otherwise inexplicable love of music has to do with the fact that the very structure of music mirrors the process of reality; it discloses the truth of things. In fact, one of the rejected titles for the book was The Cosmic Suite.

If time is an illusion, it is as if we could comprehend, say, a symphony, by taking all its notes -- which are extended in time -- and compressing them into one big noise, not unlike the final chord of A Day in the Life. Fans of Beatles lore will recall that it was produced by hammering an E chord simultaneously on four keyboards. Except that, with no time, there wouldn't even be the forty second decay that follows.

Now, just because existence is a melody, that doesn't mean the composer has completely fixed the notes, nor that we take no part in its composition. In fact, I would suggest that while the chords are indeed fixed, the existence of freedom allows us a degree of leeway as to how we choose to proceed through the "chordal space" (one might say that time is the space between the cosmic chords).

Indeed, we are so free that we can, if we so desire, ignore the chords altogether, as Ornette Coleman purports to do in his harmolodic approach.

Now, I happen to appreciate Coleman, but only because his music is a kind of "comment" on ordinary music. If his were the only kind of music, then I don't think I'd enjoy music very much. I suppose it's like, say, a horror film or thrill ride, which no one would want to experience constantly. It is frankly why I check out MSNBC once in awhile: for the momentary discordant horror.

About those cosmic chords: what are they? And how do we hear them? Well, you could say they are "archetypes," but that has too much of a Jungian connotation. How about just human nature? Which I suppose leads us back to the book we're discussing, A Theological Anthropology. Man always develops through time, right? Remember adolescence? Childhood? Infancy? What was that all about? For starters, it was an unending process of change. But what -- or who -- was changing? And "toward" whom?

I suppose that's like hearing a melody and trying to figure out what it is that is changing, when it is the nature of a melody to change. This suggests that we are not notes, but rather, unique melodies. Or, each of us takes a unique path through the chordal space of time. We are each a mirror of the Song Supreme.

You could even say that God himself is one endless song with three chords: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And as one chap expressed it, Three Chords Good.

Out of time! This tune will resume tomorrow...

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

The Cosmic Redemption Center

"Pride prevents intelligence become rationalism from rising to its source" (Schuon). Rather, in denying its source -- which is both deeper and higher -- it replaces Spirit with matter, thus accomplishing the Inversion of inversions, or Mother of All Demons: "proud reason" denies "its own nature," but this hardly prevents it from thinking -- if you call that thought!

The end result is that "torrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

It seems that this is what the Obama administration has been reduced to (minus the brilliance) on every front: cobbling together a world that exists only in speech, while insisting that our eyes and bank accounts deceive us.

I know. Breaking news from 2008!

The dogged attempt to conform to the ideological fantasy world of the left is what got us into this multidimensional mess to begin with. I wouldn't even call these dopes ideologues; emotiologues is more like it. The left doesn't actually have an intelligentsia, only a bitter resentia or sappy sentimentia.

The Good News is preceded by the Bad News -- which is precisely what makes it good. In other words, if you haven't first been apprised of the bad news, then the good news will make no sense. It will have no context.

What is liberalism but a systematic attempt to deny people their right to hear the bad news, and to thereby get their affairs in order and handle their isness?

Regarding the bad news, the mature person will say to the physician: give it to me straight, doc! Don't sugarcoat it.

Okay. The bad news is that you have fallen and you can't get up -- at least not on your own, and not all the way.

The good news? There is help, as nonlocal operators are always standing by, ready to assist you.

Me? I don't believe in "guardian angels." Rather, I just rely on mine for all he's worth.

About this fall: it seems -- as alluded to in paragraph one above -- that it is very much wrapped up in this thing called "pride." Indeed, it has always been known that pride cometh before a clusterfark, and that an arrogant attitude precedes a fall landslide.

Now, to even say "fall" is to imply verticality. In the absence of the vertical there is no place to fall, nor any place to ascend to, except in one's own eyes (customarily projected into others in order to mirror and confirm one's pride). What is the lust for fame but a misguided search for confirmation of one's wrongness (i.e., that wrong is right)? Even I am sometimes subject to this temptation, because how could 26 Raccoons be wrong about me?

The contemporary world -- its dominant mentality -- is a tangle of inversions that proceed from the first. This, in my opinion, is what it means to be born into sin. A man cannot exist without a world, even an inverted one. We all have to conform ourselves in some form or fashion to this corrupt place, unless we are given the gift of total detachment, like a Saint Francis. But few people have that particular calling.

Pride --> Fall. Fall --> Stubborn arrogance. Absence of humility --> Gradual loss of ability to recognize, revere, and bow down before what surpasses oneself. ObamaWorld.

Now, there is something about falling that results in "brokenness," as in fragmentation and loss of wholeness. Who claims to be whole? Show me this man, and I will show you an unredeemed assoul!

Conveniently, I am reading a book by Balthasar called A Theological Anthropology, which has also been published as Man in History, but in the original German as The Whole in the Fragment. One might say "the health in the brokenness," or "the one in the many," or "the God in the man," or "the voice in my head."

In chapter one, Balthasar speaks of encountering God in the upper vertical; since he is "already there," this is something like a memory, even though it is a new experience.

And to "think," (quoting Augustine) is "to take things that the memory already contained, but scattered and unarranged, and, by thinking, bring them together."

In this regard, it seems that love and unity go together like... pride and fragmentation: for by engaging in disciplined verticalisthenics, "we are collected and bound up into unity within oneself, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity" (Augustine). Just as the Fall brings fragmentation in its wake, the assent reveals wholeness, or begins to heal the fragmentation (health and wholeness being cognates):

"To descend into time means to 'wander away,' to 'fall away,' to... sink into the abyss which the creature would be by himself, without God's creative and grace-bestowing act..." (Balthasar). "Turned away from unchanging truth," man "drifts in folly and wretchedness" (Augustine).

You might say that the ascending person and descending light meet in a spiroidal, "ever-increasing mutual penetration" (Balthasar).

Critically, this occurs in matter, in the body, and in history, not in some timeless, unchanging platonic realm above, a la Plotinus or Buddhism. In order to undo the great cosmic inversion, we must both turn around and look up, so that God, so to speak, may be down and in with us. Emmanuel.

In this way time is no longer the corrosive and entropic enemy of the Gnostics, but rather, the medium of creativity -- including the creative response to God, which indeed "redeems the time."

So yes, that is correct: the Raccoon lodge is not unlike the sacred "redemption center" where we bring our old containers to be recycled and remade into new ones.

Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. --2 Cor 4:16

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