Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Fatigue and Fuzzy Vision in the No-Spinoza Zone

Friends, this is a test of my blogging kung fu. Kung fu very weak today. If I ramble, you will forgive me. Last night, for whatever reason, His Majesty woke up every 45 minutes or so, leaving me a sadly depleted caricature of my normally buoyant self. It's not that I mind being tired. In pre-blogging days, I would have simply set the day aside to get myself caught up with tasks and responsibilities that only call upon the medulla, such as cleaning out the rain gutters, doing my taxes, or checking my entire body for skin tumors.

One thing about fatigue and illness. They do serve to reinforce the hyperdimensional nature of reality, for when we are sick or tired--at least for me--the higher dimensions sort of become eclipsed. The world collapses back down to its lowest representation, the material. In fact, one of the most painful aspects of chronic pain and illness--including mental illness---is that it tends to foreclose those higher dimensions, leaving us exiled in a flatland of mere physicality.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Sophisticated secularists are of the uniform belief that religiosity represents a lower order of thought, at best a quaint mythological way to represent our infantile hopes and wishes. But this could not be a greater distortion of the truth, for in reality, we must raise intellect up to religion, not lower religion down to our intellect. In order to do this, we must develop latent capacities that lay dormant in the psyche. In so doing, the familiar world we know with our senses is turned upside-down and inside-out, as we begin to see the higher in the lower. Time becomes space, in that mere duration is now experienced as the moving image of eternity. Faith becomes vision--literally.

It is not just a matter of knowing where to look, but how to look. Religions are supposed to provide structures in order to illuminate the spiritual facts of our experience. Like good scientific theories, they not only make sense of those facts, but also allow us to see new facts, in the same way that the paradigm of quantum physics allowed scientists to see an entirely new realm of phenomena that was invisible to them with the old Newtonian, mechanistic paradigm. The facts were there all along, but without a theory through which to look, no one saw them. Likewise, spiritual facts are all around and within us, but without a spiritual practice, they tend to go unnoticed. One might say that you should try to know God not because He exists, but so that He exists.

As I have mentioned before with regard to imagination, it has a positive and a negative connotation. In its negative sense, it involves abandoning ourselves to the idle machinery of the monkey mind. It is a kind of bad detachment from reality in favor of an infrahuman sub-reality. It is as much a closed circle as is mere cerebral intellectuality.

But imagination in its positive sense is absolutely vital for religious understanding. Again, imagination is the membrane that makes contact with the higher world. It is dangerous to try to understand religious truths in a merely rational way, because it reduces them to the mere known and undermines their function of bypassing the ego and vaulting us out of our conventional way of knowing.

Apparently, there are few people who understand what I'm talking about. But those who do understand, understand exactly what I'm talking about. How then to communicate with those who don't? To them it will just seem like irrational nonsense. One of the benefits of being this tired is that I can well understand where they're coming from. To a certain unavoidable extent--except perhaps in saints and avatars--the higher planes are somewhat state-dependent, no different, really, than the way in which morbid anxiety during a test might prevent one from accessing the information needed to pass the test.

Here again, this cannot be emphasized enough. We only bring a few vital tools with us as we approach the realm of spirit, and much of our spiritual practice has to do with honing these tools, in particular, imagination, attention and memory. Attention must become focussed and yet relaxed and fluid, while memory must begin to operate vertically, not just horizontally. To the extent that attention is fragmented and dispersed in the horizontal, it is doubtful that you will be able to recollect the vertical. This is what meditation and prayer are all about. They are the keys to the kingdom, but they are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are simply exercises: "verticalisthenics," as I call them.

Speaking of being misunderstood, reader Benedict S., a disciple of the philosopher Spinoza, is a case in point. He is trying to understand this blog through the lens of Spinoza's purely rational philosophy, which cannot be done without reducing it to an image of Spinozistic pantheism. I specifically reject any form of pantheism based not upon intellectual speculation, but upon objective metaphysics and personal experience. I'm sure that most readers who enjoy this blog would agree entirely with me.

I see no evidence that Spinoza had any personal acquaintance with the transcendent God, which is why he attempted to reduce the vertical to a simple horizontal oneness. In short, he engaged in a misguided search for the One through the application of reason, therefore taking him down the sterile road of cosmolatry. Like all wrong philosophies--no matter how brilliant--when they reduce reality to mere cerebral intellection they will be only faint shadows of the Real--adumbrations that are missing a few vital dimensions, because the higher reaches of thought lie outside any application of worldly Aristotelian logic.

Of me, Benedict writes that my recent entries stike him "as having been written by a relatively educated and erudite individual, but one who on some matters regards himself as a 'seeker'. (On others, Bob pretends to be a 'having founder,' but I'll save that for another day.) Bob speaks of the many different views of God that have been recorded by many different people, the early and modern Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, and (I suppose if I read all the way through) all the other people who have at one time or another 'seen God' as this or that apparition."

Do you see the problem here? To be a guest in the Cosmos and employ that condescending and passive-aggressive tone, with the use of "pretend" and "apparition"? I'm frankly not surprised that Petey got a little ticked off. Petey doesn't barge in to other people's blogs and bash Spinoza, although he could surely pick him apart if he felt like it. He's done it before. It is hardly as if we didn't encounter Mr. Spinoza on the way up, dwelling in the foothills of pure reason. How to communicate with such an individual? One cannot. One shouldn't even try, for one has already been dismissed as someone who pretends to see apparitions, or worse, someone who actually sees them. Either way, not a person to be taken seriously. I am clearly someone who lives in the no-Spinoza zone.

Benedict dismisses me as someone who is perhaps "not really interested in finding the absolute truth," which is presumably Spinoza'a metaphysically closed and circular rationalism. He says that I "speak off and on of [my] preference for the 'vertical' as opposed to the 'horizontal' life. [Bob] means by 'vertical' a looking upward in our mind's eye, searching as it were for Godness, as opposed to looking around horizontally in the world. My criticism of his method traces essentially to the horizontality of [Bob's] vertical look. By delving into the fuzziness of the ancient religions, and apparently trying to jibe them with his own in a detailed sort of way, [Bob] adds unnecessary complexity to his struggle. I would rather simply say, 'Those people were looking for God,' and then move on to a search focused more on the here-and-now. That's what [I] did years ago and wound up with Spinoza's God, an absolutely simple concept of the divine."

This such a beastly distortion. The only reason I am taking the time to correct it is because it was posted publicly on his blog. I do not "speak off and on of my preference for the vertical as opposed to the horizontal life." First, his impoverished definition of verticality demonstrates a complete lack of familiarity with how I use the term. Second, I specifically emphasize in all of my writing that reality has both a horizontal and vertical component, and that any comprehensive view of the world can ignore neither. The whole point is to live vertically in the horizontal--not to get lost in the horizontal wasteland of materialism, pantheism, or rationalism, but also not to pursue purely escapist spiritual programs that facilitate only vertical ascent without proper deference to the horizontal.

Benedict's contemptuous dismissal of religion ("maybe he's not really interested in finding the absolute truth") betrays only his (and Spinoza's) innocence of that to which religion refers. To the extent that religions appear "fuzzy" to him, that is an honest statement. However, it is not a statement about the object of his perception, but a statement about his distance from that object. Of course Truth appears fuzzy and simple from so far away.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

"It is dangerous to try to understand religious truths in a merely rational way, because it reduces them to the mere known..."

Exactly. It is an effort to capture the uncapture-able. In fact, the wise suggest, in the ultimate blessedness, It captures us.

Hence the terminal irrelevance of the "they can't tell me what to think" approach to religious objections. Because that's not the point. Rather, the magnificent rubrics and topics -- dogmas -- are offered as preternaturally rich&compelling memes to engage our inner vision, to feel our way into. To attentively imagine. To remember. They are portals, and need to be theo-engineered with accuracy lest a lintel teeter ominously. But they are not content as the etiolated generic graduate seminar knows content.

Then again, ( :-) I gotta face it ) maybe little pietistic multi-syllabic outbursts like this are why some 74-year-olds, with impeachment rallies and Spinoza speeches packing their day-timers, have social lives so much richer than mine...

Anonymous said...

So, Bob - does this mean you won't be going to Benedict's Spinoza lecture this evening?

Anonymous said...

Dilys - exactly.
Drawing on my own tradition, look at the lives of the saints. All so different, but with the same focus? motivation? Operating within the same parameters, but with wonderful variety.

Bob- anyone who doesn't understand that you're working on a "both/and" basis re: the horizontal and vertical is not reading you carefully.

Anonymous said...

All the same, Bob, reason is necessary to take first steps toward enlightenment, even if its usefulness as means to understanding the Infinite is limited.

Remind you of aside by GK Chesterton character: "I knew you weren't a priest when you attacked reason. It's bad theology."

And patterned after Kant's philosophy, I add.

Anonymous said...

You know, in better, less critical, times than these, I could say of mr benedict: Ah well, so this is his lifetime, with perhaps more to come, to explore the limits of mentation/rational thought until it finally exhausts itself, at which point a mildly despairing mr benedict looks to the sky and thinks, hmm, maybe there's something more here.

But - seems to me the hour is getting pretty late. The barbarians are really at the gate. Anyone with an ounce of spiritual clarity can see that evil, the real deal, is coiling for an end-game. At this juncture in the Cosmic Drama, one is either contributing to the - oh hell, let's call it the Good - or one is contributing to the other side. No fence-straddling, ain't allowed. Time to declare yourself either fish or fowl.

So yeah, Petey's ire is justified, as is mine. Because mr benedict, however in his small way, is, bluntly put, contributing to evil. He is replicating the same kind of stuff that has snuffed out the Light for centuries, that has led to the ethical, moral, and spiritual demise of Europe, that has fed the life-slandering ethos that has polluted the world over and left us all staring into the abyss.

So mr benedict goes off to his impeachment rally. How perfect. While the mad mullahs get all their nukes in a row, mr benedict wants to help weaken the moral resolve of the West, what's left of it, so those scheming genocide can be that much more encouraged in their efforts.

So, I think the time is ripe for calling mr benedict's somnambulence exactly what it is -spiritual failure, an acquiescence to and abetting of evil. Sorry, but it's really that black and white. He may be ignorant and know not what he does, thus forgivable on that level - but I'm convinced that at this time we are fully culpable for our ignorance. The Truth has been "out there", in one form or another, long enough for everybody to partake of it, and if we haven't done so by this time, the fault is ours.

thnx

Anonymous said...

Will,

Your articulate expression of the truth can hardly be improved on. Permit me to make a small additonal remark. I wondered whether people of Benedict's ilk ever consider the inherent contradiction in their wish for world peace and a cessation of the killing of innocents and the undoubtable truth that in aiding and abetting the enemy who is surely encouraged by the dissenters among us they embolden him to commit even more attacks on defenseless women and children. They ally themselves with Islamofacist terrorists who are known to put explosives into the bodies of slain children which are remote detonated when the mother goes to retrieve them. And then there is this from a report by journalist Michael J. Totten in Iraq Kurdistan "The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall. “I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.” “Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.” http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001068.html The pictures here are heart rending.

I am so sorry for the great suffering of innocents and am grieved even more for the attitudes of those like the detritus of civilisation that is Benedict. A week ago this Thursday I attended a funeral near here for one PFC Tina Priest who was killed in Iraq. She and her family are among the true heroes of the world and my heart swells with pride that I was privileged in my day to wear the same uniform and serve in the same and continuing noble quest for liberty.

John Hinds

Anonymous said...

Bob wrote:

We only bring a few vital tools with us as we approach the realm of spirit, and much of our spiritual practice has to do with honing these tools, in particular, imagination, attention and memory. Attention must become focussed and yet relaxed and fluid, while memory must begin to operate vertically, not just horizontally. To the extent that attention is fragmented and dispersed in the horizontal, it is doubtful that you will be able to recollect the vertical. This is what meditation and prayer are all about. They are the keys to the kingdom, but they are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are simply exercises: "verticalisthenics," as I call them.

THanks Bob for the practical nature of your post today.
Vacationing in Hawaii one would think that my vertical would be on the "high" setting (which it was for the first couple of days) but since I am camping at night and experiencing trade winds, a full moon and intermittent rain, my vertical has been turned down to medium/low.
One thing I was able to do in my reduced state was to visit the Arizona Memorial and shed tears in the company of Americans (and others) who still understand and appreciate the concept of sacrifice for a worthy cause.
Much more fulfilling than gutter cleaning.

LiquidLifeHacker said...

Wow...I have a couple of things I want to comment on here today!

It's always a pleasure to see dily *waves* cause I always enjoy her comments on here and she always leaves links for us to explore!

Bob---
Sorry you aren't getting sleep...but sleep deprivation seems to bring out the "Petey" in ya! LOOOOOOOOOOOOL Thats a good thing!

You share with us today that for you, "The world collapses back down to its lowest representation, the material. In fact, one of the most painful aspects of chronic pain and illness--including mental illness---is that it tends to foreclose those higher dimensions, leaving us exiled in a flatland of mere physicality."

I cannot speak for the mental illness part here, not full blown anyway *wink wink* but I can speak about chronic pain, as I have been very close to that at one time. My experience about it agrees that it does toss the physical world back down to a low representation...and it physically can bring you down with it...but in retrospect, I would have to add that there is something very amazing that takes place in the "low spots" because for me...it is there that I have had some of my highest of highs on a spiritual connection. The old saying, "hitting rock bottom, then you have no where to go but up?" well I agree with that too especially when its self inflicted, but there is something truly enlightening when you are suddenly and unwillingly tossed inside the rhelm of chronic acute pain and everything about you is screaming out for help or when you are so fatigued from sleep deprivation that your internal organs are screaming out for rest. Those moments or even longer days and nights for some, bless their hearts, are low times and the lowest spots....but I tell you from experience that when I have been forced to "the low" that is when part of me gets carried to the highest. How can that be? Well...its a humbling spot to be in I tell you and a place full of humility...but in order to get through the next minute or hour or day, one has to reach out and ask for help. Its in those low spots that the spirit of God's hand comes down and comforts you. I remember as a child asking about how when Jesus left and His promise of sending The Spirit of truth and comfort, thinking would I ever experience that? Well...I did many times, but never gave the glory to where it deserved until I realised that all comfort comes from above and that over time I can tell you, that I have not only felt it personally....but seen it through others! Have you ever noticed that water seeks the lowest spots? Yeah...I always come out of the low much higher and a feeling of being "washed"...because in the lowest of spots I am forced to let go and depend and trust on my maker. I see the brightest of hope and have felt extreme closeness in my vertical during the lowest times of my horizontal.

Will---
You say today, "So mr benedict goes off to his impeachment rally. How perfect. While the mad mullahs get all their nukes in a row, mr benedict wants to help weaken the moral resolve of the West, what's left of it, so those scheming genocide can be that much more encouraged in their efforts"

Ha Ha...well I think going off to impeachment rallies and such are just reponses to fear. IMHO, It's like a 'lynching process', because it fools the people involved which are all worked up into thinking they are taking appropriate action, but the sad thing is...its just a quick substitute to calm their internal fears and yet another way to continue to deny the real truth and the real enemy. But hey...its a free country for now...guess we better all enjoy our freedom of expression while we still have it because every day there is a force trying to bully us out of it!

Anonymous said...

It sounds to me that Benedict has a lot of homework left to do.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Hinds - thanks for your comment and your service. And to PFC Priest, a prayerful shoutout.

And thanks to all those who serve the Greater Good, often alone and invisibly, by having courageously opted for consciousness and conscience,in longsuffering and patience.

Every bit matters. Everything counts.

Anonymous said...

Liquid - it may be, as you said, that the benedicts are in fear-denial, etc., but my point was they should know better by now, that they are ultimately responsible for their own blinkered vision. And this is no small thing because their ignorance feeds, by way of some ever-accelerating psychic osmosis, a universal, archetypal evil.

Bro. Bartleby said...

Gospel of Thomas Saying 3

Jesus said: If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.

Anonymous said...

Will said: "...their ignorance feeds, by way of some ever-accelerating psychic osmosis, a universal, archetypal evil."

At the risk of repeating myself this reminds me of similar sentiments I posted in these pages some time ago. We were discussing something quite different than todays' topic.....or were we? This was my comment then:

"Besides the great lord who is omnipresent there are everywhere smaller lords too. Some are tiny, infinitely small.

For whatever activity undertaken, there is a spirit for that doing and that spirit in time gets a life of its own, gets self awareness as it goes on. These acts eventually become forms of worship.

Knowingly or unknowingly our acts, ritualized and regularly played out, constitute worship, praise of spirits. The meditator eventually becomes the object of meditation. These spirits range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the most terrible evil to the most beautiful good, and so on.

Doing good enhances goodness. Goodness is the reservoir drawn from when acts of kindness are done. And it is thereby increased. These acts are like accretions. Charity grows by use. Doing right this time makes it easier the next and so forth."

John Hinds

Gagdad Bob said...

Bro--

That's a darn good gospel. I wish I had used the following passage from it in my book:

"Have you found the beginning that you look to the end? Where the end is, is where the beginning is. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning, for the one who stands at the beginning will know the end."

Better yet, "Blessed is the one who comes into being before he came into being."

Anonymous said...

>>Doing good enhances goodness. Goodness is the reservoir drawn from when acts of kindness are done. And it is thereby increased. These acts are like accretions. Charity grows by use. Doing right this time makes it easier the next and so forth."<<

John, wonderful. I believe that's exactly as it is. And I think it makes it easier for *everybody* who desires to enter into the Spirit of Goodness and Charity to do so. Makes the reservoir a little bit more accessable for all. Charity, I think, always involves a bit of sacrifice - and sometimes more than a little bit. Many tend to think of the concept of sacrifice as being for its own sake, merely a symbolic gesture. But I think the more accurate view of sacrifice is: Giving up something to get something better, for one's self, for others. This, I think, is the dynamic of the Spiritual Initiation.

LiquidLifeHacker said...

will---" my point was they should know better by now, that they are ultimately responsible for their own blinkered vision"

I knew what ya meant...and yes they should know better...but like so many truths...eyes must open to see! I think a real guage to it all is when the terrorist like old bin ladin count on the internal conflicts of our nation! He must smile big at the works of Hollywood's anti Americanism in the name of art!

I personally don't fall for this liberal view that being down on our commander in chief or the policies during a time of war is not Anti-American since their defence of their actions is its just a freedom to speak out against authoriity....and don't get me wrong...its all cool when a war is not active...but doing it during a time of war is just pettiness especially when actors or directors use it for profit.

Anonymous said...

I agree, Liquid. The benedicts are the ones who refused to see the evil of Hitler, who constantly found more fault with the USA than the USSR, the evil empire for which they always found excuses, who devised mental-masturbatory excuses for all kinds of criminality, and who now obsess with the "war criminality" of G Bush for his having the criminal audacity to actually overthrow a genocidal, psychopathic tyrant.

The truth is the benedicts have a sea of blood on their hands.

To Mr Sponer: Yes, I also feel sad for benedict in the sense that I feel sad for our tragically fallen world. I too wish him the best - but not on the terms that he would think of as being the "best".

Anonymous said...

Fair Hope - Bob can answer for himself obviously, but since I'm the one who is loosing most of the arrows here, let me say a couple of things in response to your comment.

First, in any other blog I would deal with benedict as I would any fellow citizen of earth, that is, with a modicum of respect and courtesy. On the street, I'd do what I can to help benedict with his daily burden. But Bob's blog is not any other blog, and it's certainly not street-level. In a way, this blog is a little patch of Dreamtime (in the Aboriginal sense) - this is, as far as blogs go, a realm of the Archetypes. Personalities don't matter here; essence does. This is where the archetypal chess pieces come into sharp focus. And there is a chess game going on, ie., war.

It's not just the war in Iraq or the cultural/civilizational clash. Those are the material manifestations of war on the meta-level, and a real war, it is. Here, like it or not, benedict is the Enemy. In the consensus reality world, benedict might be a perfectly nice guy, might give to charities and be kind to children and small animals; I might even like him. But here, he is the Enemy. He is, by virtue of his own words, on the other side. Doesn't mean he'd attack you on the street. But he's quite literally serving a side that wants to destroy us.

Here, in this blog-realm, you don't hold back in the face of the Enemy. In some respects, there's really a minumum of nuance here when it comes to the Big Issues. I'm told there was a war in heaven once. Now this was no doubt a clash on some metaphysical level with implications and meanings far far beyond my ken, but bottom line, it was a war and there probably wasn't a lot of troubled thought about Old Testament-like overreaction involved, if you know what I mean. In the archetypal theater, slack should not be cut - to do so is to compromise and should never compromise when the Big Issues are at stake.

One other thing - this isn't a case of projecting my own "inner-benedict" onto an external entity named "benedict". Oh, I've got an inner-benedict all right and I'm well aware of him. All my comments re the outer-benedict and all that he represents in the external world are addressed to the inner-benedict as well. No compromises with him either.

Here's hoping that this hasn't been too overwrought. Blessings to you, Fair Hope.

Anonymous said...

Title: Manifesto of a Myers-Briggs "NT:

Will's response above points out a crucial matter for the life of the mind that Jung discovered but few have developed. That is, on different "levels" the morality reverses. The archetypal gods and kings propagated themselves by incest. Don't try this in the suburbs.

So his recent response could take it further. Be-Nice PC is enforced by speech codes, and MBTI personality-types ("F," right?) with no taste for the searing light of a hard look seize the microphone, these days often claiming to speak for a pacifist God. Through no moral fault they do not see the whole picture or grok the interdependency of the sytems.

If places where ideas can be explored without apology disappear, then we may as well pull up stakes and bare our throats. "Can't we all just get along" is a gesture for the public street and the schoolyard. Wielded in the realm of ideas, it looks more and more like (not just here) the power-Shadow, professing the high ground of a kindergarten teacher who, anodyne book titles to the contrary notwithstanding, does not teach all there is to know about Ultimate Wisdom.

And incidentally and not accidentally, infantilizes the civic space. In the end, contrary to their criteria, it is not kindness.

Analytically, not personally, speaking.

LiquidLifeHacker said...

finding fair hope,

Can't Spirits just like men differ in ideas?

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