All Men are Coons

So, if Phase I is the selection of a human group for the vertical revelation, culminating in the preparation of a human body to bear the divine light; and Phase II is the horizontal propagation of the logos, culminating in the remaking of the external world, in particular, the development of science, economic freedom, and liberal democracy; then Phase III is the widespread interiorization of the descent on a more deeply personal basis.

As the world has been transformed, now so too must the individual, or the world's evolution cannot continue. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of our day and age is that, for the first time in history, we have everything in place for the widespread colonization of the spiritual dimension. And yet, people still frantically scatter from the center to the periphery, dispersing their very life substance untl "dying of miscellany."

In this regard, it is 1800 BC all over again, with the historical birth of the Jewish people; or perhaps 33 AD; or 1492; or 1776. In hindsight, we can see that each of these dates represented an evolutionary fork in the cosmic road for a purpose that could not possibly have been fully grasped at the time. It is "as if" we are in a time equally as revolutionary. Its signs are everywhere, and yet, few people know how to read them.

I emphasize the "as if," because at this point we are merely looking at things from a certain angle in order to see what it can illuminate. No need to reduce the Arc of Salvation to some sort of mangy dogma or domesticated catechism. But if a process can only be understood with reference to its end and not its origins, we must ask ourselves "what is the end of history?," in order to comprehend its purpose. Why history?

As I have discussed before -- including in the home version -- it is my firm coonviction, or inspired hunch anyway, that time and eternity cannot be understood without reference to each other. Unlike, say, a strict Platonist of Vedantin, I believe that time is both real and a necessary consequence of eternity -- and vice versa.

In order to understand what on earth Bob is talking about, let's use a spatial analogy. An organism is not a mere aggregate or collection of parts, but a true whole. As a result, each part of the whole is infused with the wholeness of the whole -- indeed, this is what makes a part a part and not its own autonomous whole. For example, each cell in your body contains the genetic blueprint of the entire organism, and each part of your body somehow knows how to perform its function for the benefit of the whole. Of course, organisms do occasionally have parts that are not part of the whole, but we call these "tumors" or "viruses" or "bacteria." In fact, it is no coincidence that "health" is etymologically related to "whole," and that there are countless mechanisms and functions within the body, all geared toward maintaining and returning to a state of dynamic wholeness.

Extending the analogy to time, time is to part as eternity is to whole. In a certain sense, this is just another way to reintroduce the idea of teleology, or "final causation" into metaphysics. One cannot actually think coherently in the absence of finality, which is one of the reasons why science -- or scientism, to be perfectly accurate -- is such an incoherent and unworkable metaphysic. Science relies upon teleology all the time, but merely denies the fact. It is the mysteress without whom the scientist cannot live, but is ashamed to be seen in public (to paraphrase someone).

There is an aspect of the divine reality that is both "present" and "future." If this were not true, then everything would be here now. This is simply another way of saying that, in order for there to be a creation separate from the creator, the creation must be deployed in time. But because time is necessarily "within" God, no matter how far it strays, it cannot help but eventually wend its way back to its source outside or "above" time. This "wending" is the area of our personal freedom. From another perspective, you might say that it is God's lila, or play: "the aion is a child playing with colored toys."

I realize that all of this sounds rather abstract, but it is not meant to. Or if so, the purpose of the abstraction is to illuminate the concrete. Animal man, to whom the initial descent was addressed, was absolutely incapable of comprehending abstract metaphysics, any more than a child could do so. This is why much of the Old Testament is so outwardly concrete, often presented in the form of history.

But clearly, thousands of years of rabbinical exegesis demonstrates that an extraordinarily sophisticated metaphysical abstractness was embedded in the outwardly concrete images and stories. In short, this divine descent was addressed to exterior and interior men of all levels, including levels that did not yet exist in the world. You try writing a book capable of that, and perhaps you'll appreciate its miraculous provenance. Frankly, my book would sell a lot more copies -- or even any copies -- if it were accessible to species of men other than the ring-tailed "mighty little beast" with "a spirit strong of mind."

So, just as an organism seeks wholeness, time is the unfolding spiral of cosmic destiny: "history moves to heal the wounds it has made," in the words of Charles Taylor.

Frithjoh Schuon expresses the doctrine quite clearly when he says, "Eschatology is a part of cosmology, and cosmology is a prolongation of metaphysics, which in turn is essentially the same as the sophia perennis," or universal wisdom. Thus, while intellection reveals timeless principles, one of the principles is that existence has a destiny that can only be revealed, or "unveiled" -- which is the literal meaning of apocalypse -- in time.

Here again, this is a universal intuition that is available to all men, even -- or shall we say, especially! -- to men of the left. For just as the material scientist cannot think fruitfully or coherently in the absence of teleology, the leftist cannot think about politics without the immamentization of Sugar Candy Mountain, or forced paradise.

Again, the divine message, or descent, is available to all men, but becomes garbled as a result of various impurities in the human receptacle. For example, the Jewish concept of Tikkun olam, or "repairing the world," is turned inside out and upside down by "anti-rabbis" such as Michael Lerner, just as the Christian descent is lowjacked by leftists and transmogrified into so-called "liberation theology," a cancer in the body of Christ (so to speak) if ever there was one. There are specifically Christian pathologies (the cult of victimology being one of them), Jewish pathologies, Hindu pathologies, and quite obviously Islamic pathologies.

Perhaps you may have also noticed that these pneuma-pathologies unify members across these diverse groups much more than membership in the particular group. This explains the weird alliance between, say, leftist anti-Jews such as Lerner and Chomsky and Islamo-nazis, just as it explains the grotesque alliance between the National Council of Churches and monsters such as Castro, Arafat and other enemies of mankind.

Likewise, it explains the natural alliance that cuts across and unifies proper Christians, Jews, and members of other faiths. It explains the deep reverence a Meister Eckart had for a Moses Maimonides, or Ramakrishna for Jesus, or Valentin Tomberg for Sri Aurobindo, etc. These men meet in the interior vertical, or "Coonland," just as the inferior sort of religious men meet down below in the exterior horizontal.

Now, Schuon says something that would apply to everything I have laid out above: "All our preceding considerations may seem arbitrary and imaginative in the highest degree to one who clings to that immense simplification which is the scientistic perspective." However, my cosmic omusings will become plausible if "one knows how to draw from human subjectivity all the immediate and distant consequences it implies." For it is precisely this "dazzlingly evident mystery" of subjectivity -- the interior microcosm within the macrocosm -- that "offers the key to metaphysical truths as well as mystical experiences, the one like the other requiring all that we are."

In other words, to become what you are is nothing less than for the cosmos to know who it is from the inside out, which is to say, the purpose of creation, as it were. In ether worlds, time takes time, let alone eternity. It is the great privilege of the human state to know this. I do not mean to imply that this knowledge was unknown to men in Phases I and II. Clearly that was not the case. However, never before has it become so potentially accessible and available to all men.

When I think of Al Gore -- which naturally, one tries to avoid -- I think of someone who is clearly sensitive to the Message, but who is just as clearly distorting it in a rather breathtaking manner, for he is literally turning it upside down and inside out, as if the evolutionary crisis of mankind is within the environment and not the soul. Much of the "hysteria of the age" results from exactly this type of distortion, just as a sexual perversion involves distortion of "energy from below," so to speak.

For want of a less loaded term, let us just say that the hail of shakti or "universal k" is coming down the size of grapefruits, pelting everyone below: "the sun shines on both the wicked and righteous," and all that. Some people strap on a suicide bomb while others hallucinate about a "Christo-fascist takeover," but everyone gets hit and tries to figure out why we have hail on earth.

A great many primordial conflicts are rising to the surface and being worked out in the field of time. Mankind's future evolution hinges on their outcome, no less than it hinged on the earlier preparation of a human group and a human body. For now, the only viable human future will have to involve all of mankind, not in some twisted left-hand exterior version enforced by elites from on high, but in a truly interior-vertical sense. One way or another, all men must become Coons, even if they don't yet have a public school diploma or can't come up with the $1.50 initiation fee.

I have a dream that one day the horizontal world will rise up and live out the true meaning of Bob's screed: "One Cosmos Under God." I have a dream that my little kit will one day live in a cosmos where he will not be judged by the color of his coat but the content of his cap.