Holy Matterimany, a Manifestivus for the Rest of Us!

As I said, Petey and I are going to continue running through the 20 "Coon questions" posed a couple of days ago by Anonymous, so long as the questions remain interesting and we can come up with answers so plausible that they convince even ourselves.

Please note that this is live blogging, or "extreme seeking," which is the only way to capture Petey's interest. Nothing has been rehearsed and there are no second takes. Well, maybe a spell check.... and I usually find some awkward passages when I reread things later in the day, so I do edit those.... And sometimes I later add in a few jokes.... But that's not the point. As I said, we want this to be an exercise in improvisational metaphysics, or O-->(k), which is to say cross-coontry intellection, which is not the same as making it up as you go along, Bob, even though it may sometimes look like that.

Which, by the way, applies to the Coonifesto. Thus far it has only received positive reviews, but believe me, I have no illusions about this, because these reviewers have been sympathetic to the coonspiracy theory presented in the book. If you are, say, a primitive New York Timesman who is not sympathetic to my tiptopsiturvical vision, or just a sufficiently malignant and black-hearted agenda-driven critic, you could easily pick it apart from the bottom up, which will no doubt happen: Bob, you said the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old. Scientists now know that it's 15 billion years old, you fool! Homo sapiens didn't emerge 120,000 years ago, it was only 100,000 years ago! Etc.

This is a species of what Bion called "attacks on linking," which is a defense mechanism aimed at dismantling what we might call a "threatening whole" in order to turn it into a bunch of meaningless parts. There are two kinds of intelligence, an "analytic" kind and a "synthesizing" kind, and although two people can have the identical IQ, it is very easy for the intelligent-analytic person, if afflicted with mind parasites, to attack the links of the visionary kind. Just so, it is equally easy for the synthetic type of intelligence to be hijacked by paranoid mind parasites which essentially conflate perception and projection. This type of person has the opposite problem, in that they must scrupulously avoid any new evidence, or "links," that threaten the projected vision.

In our scientific age, we are much more aware of the latter problem than the former, but both are equally catastrophic to the soul. For example, we all know of religious yahoos who are threatened by science because it contradicts a very narrow "vision" of how God operates in the world.

But even more common are the leftists, tenured wackademics, and anti-science secular fundamentalists who have a completely unhinged vision of mankind, and thus must reject basic economics, or the self-evident truth of innate gender differences, or the abundant evidence that some cultures are much better than others, and so on. I won't say "ironically," because it's not: atheists and leftists are no less attached to a "religious vision" than the religious, and use the identical defense mechanisms to ward off any threats to this vision. What did Dr. Sanity say just yesterday? "The political left has created and fully integrated specific ideological tools that facilitate ongoing psychological denial."

In order to be a "good faith Coon" we must always harmonize the synthesizing and analytic modes of intelligence, which is just another way of emphasizing the truism that the proper Raccoon habitat is at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal, which is to say reality. For reality is neither the vision of the whole nor the perception of the parts, but an evolutionary dialectical relationship between them, similar, if not identical, to the body's balancing of metabolism (building up) and catabolism (tearing down). We tend to identify "life" with metabolism, or "building up," but it is equally "tearing down." It reminds me of weight lifting, which causes microscopic damage to muscles, which grow larger in response.

When you see a materialist "innocently" using the analytic function to tear down a non-materialistic vision such as mine, always be on the lookout for the critic's own threatened vision, which is generally -- so far, at least -- the true motivation for the attack. It is very much like those homeless schizophrenics who look so frightening. In reality, few schizophrenics are actually dangerous. Rather, they are terrified, in particular, of people. Thus, they appear frightening in order to scare people away.

We had a transparent example of this yesterday, when a completely ignorant -- and therefore "innocent" -- critic barged into the Cosmos and naively blasted away at my vision. Presumably she thought that she was a threat to me, when the opposite is true. In her case -- just like the religious person with the narrow vision alluded to above -- she has a thin and shallow understanding of psychoanalysis that excludes any spiritual truth whatsoever. All of us, by our very nature, recognize the Absolute, but in her case it is something she calls the Unconscious, a word that both she and I use, but in entirely different ways. The main point is that my vision easily accomodates the very important truths of psychoanalysis, whereas her vision is so narrow that it excludes even the barest hint of spiritual knowledge. Rather, for her, a spiritual person is simply "worshiping" his own unconscious.

I don't want to get sidetracked into cataloging all of the a priori errors manifested in this defective mode of thought. Suffice it to say that if her narrow vision were correct, she would certainly not be excluded from it, so an equally ignorant and sufficiently motivated person could dismantle her position on the grounds that she is worshiping her own unconscious in a religiously irreligious way. It is a completely logically self-refuting position, as is any absolute relativism, which is strictly absurd. How could the relative possibly be absolute? If it were, then it would be absolute, which is to say, not relative.

So when one person is attacking another's vision, a Raccoon should always employ his or her Coon scent to sniff out the hidden agenda. An important historian -- I can't remember his name offhand -- said words to the effect that "every historian has a bee in his bonnet. When you read his work, listen for the buzzing." The buzzing, you see, is his "vision," his "whole." I suppose there are still naive historians who believe that history can be written without a vision, or that the vision results from simple induction of historical "facts," but this is utter nonsense.

Rather, being that history represents a pool of literally infinite facts, only an antecedent historical vision can even tell the historian which facts are historically "important." In other words, to write "history," one must precisely exclude 99.99% of historical facts. But on what basis? On the basis of a vision, usually a metaphysically naive and unarticulated one. Not only that, but secular historians make all kinds of faulty assumptions about the nature of time, about human nature, and about vertical influences, so that much contemporary history is only useful for the facts it might contain as opposed the banal vision within which the facts are woven. Needless to say, the identical facts can support radically different visions, but very few visions include both vertical and horizontal facts.

Oops. Got sidetracked. But then again, perhaps not, for the next questions are, "How do I reconcile my multiplicity with God's inherent unity?," and "Why would ultimate perfection choose to manifest at all, let alone in fallen, shattered souls?"

With regard to the first question, this is just another way of asking how we reconcile verticality and horizontality, analysis and synthesis, spirit and matter, interior and exterior, whole and part. We do so by doing so, both on a micro level (within ourselves) and on a macro level (with the cosmos). To be honest, the former must precede the latter, for, as the Master said, The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. What this means is that, in order to have a comprehensive and vivifying vision of the One, we must ourselves be truly one, for our own shattered unity -- or fallenness -- will obscure our interior vision of the whole.

We must first seek to unify our own little portion of the cosmos -- ourselves -- before we can presume to unify others, which is why leftism is always wrong and against the law. It proposes the imposition of a false top-down unity, which is no unity at all, merely totalitarianism in disguise. For unity -- or internal coherence -- can only be achieved, not imposed, and this is the catastrophic error made by leftists and Islamo-nazis alike. Both wish to impose their narrow, crimped vision on the rest of us. Both are pathological adaptations to modernity, romantic attempts to recover the lost wholeness that occurred with the industrial revolution and the decline of traditional religion. But this backward looking unity will never work, any more than the Christian fundamentalist's will (not to perversely equate the latter with leftism or Islamism, which are infinitely more dangerous).

Rather, unity is ongoing. It is a constant dynamic synthesis of parts into whole and of whole conferring meaning and coherence upon the parts. This is Raccoon religion in its generic sense, and it is a religion that easily fits science under its warm and expansive cap. The converse is never true, for parts can never account for the whole of which they are parts. When we say "God is One," we are equally saying that Oneness is God (a reflection of God, to be precise), which is to say that the immanent One exists in the parts, which thereby perpetually transcend themselves in our own recognition of the transcendent One. This is how you reconcile your multiplicity with God's inherent unity, for multiplcity is simply unity in action, or eternity in time.

And "Why would ultimate perfection choose to manifest at all, let alone in fallen, shattered souls?" Because, among other reasons, it is the nature of the perfect sovereign good to radiate its goodness from the divine center to the cosmic periphery, for which reason offenses must come. For it means that God, by his very nature, "relinquishes" a portion of his own omnipotence by virtue of his infinitude, which of necessity extends into a horizontal herebelow. Which is just another way of saying that man alone is privileged to live at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical -- and which is why the "cure" for our own "shatteredness" is never an impossibility but always at hand, for we are a living mirrorcle of the Absolute, a little whole in Oneness.