Hail Mary, Full of Ideas!

For those of you who are not football fans, a "Hail Mary" is a desperate pass into the end zone, when your team is behind and the clock is winding down. The quarterback just heaves the ball up in the air and hopes for the best.

Speaking of Hail Marys, I've gotten into the habit of desperately tossing ideas into my posts, not necessarily knowing what they mean, but trusting that they mean something, and that some alert and nimble-fingered wide receptacle of a reader will catch them. This ensures that I am always on the edge of what I (don't) know. However, it can also mean that I am not only crossing over a line into the area of what I don't yet know, but into what is unknowable or even what is Raccoonically incorrect. I mean, assuming there is a cutting edge, then it must by definition cut both ways, into those things that are novel and true as well as those that are just trivial or false novelties, like Black Liberation Theology or Andrew Sullivan.

In the Raccoon nonderstanding, the more one truly knows, the more one doesn't know -- the latter of which is a very different thing from "the less one knows." Let me explain with an absurcular analogy.

If what we call reality is a sphere that contains all of our knowledge of whatever kind, the more genuine knowledge we possess, the more the sphere expands. But obviously, as the sphere expands, the surface area where it shades off into the unknown expands. Since the "unknown" is literally infinite and dwarfs the known, all our profane knowledge combined is just a drop in the bucket we'll kick way before it's ever full or even emptied. No matter how much of the unknown we colonize with human knowledge, it will only "grow" in size. (The infinite cannot literally grow, being that it is already infinite.)

As an example of a Hail Mary, just yesterday a cryptic thought spontaneously occurred to me which I tossed into the post: real thought is the essence of prayer, linking man with what is timeless and eternal.

What is this supposed to mean? Is it true? Yes, I'm pretty sure it's true, but I don't yet know why. Rather, there is simply a sense of certainty, a feeling that if I try to flesh it out, I will find that it is backed by the full faith and credit of forces greater than myself, forces that "sponsored" or provoked the thought to begin with. In other words, a thought is like a wave tossed up by the ocean. Or, put it this way: where there is a wave, you can assume there is an ocean in your notion somewhere.

As a brief aside, most of the things people call "thoughts" aren't actually proper thoughts at all. This may come as a shock to you, but most people have never had an original thought in their life, any more than they have made a witty comment. For example, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are presumably smart guys, but I challenge anyone to identify an original thought in their vacuous books. There is no question in my mind that Brak has more original thoughts than Barack, whose defunct economic and social ideas (to paraphrase Tom Sowell) come straight out of the 1960s, and whose discredited foreign policy ideas come out of the 1930s. Nothing novel there.

To extend the ocean analogy, these sorts of pseudo-thoughts are more like ripples on the surface caused by superficial atmospheric changes, like wind over the water. For example, I largely see the MSM as a sort of vast wind machine that blows over the waters and stirs things up so that no one is aware of the more enduring waves, let alone the tsunamis off in the distance. In addition, when the water is stirred up in this manner -- what I call "the daily tempest" or liberal hysteria of the hour -- few people have the calm detachment necessary to see through to the depths.

Also, just like the ocean, there are stable "currents" that persist through time. On the one hand, these can be analogous to structures rooted in timeless truth, such as the U.S. Constitution; or, they can be analogous to what Buddhists call "samskaras" or what a Raccoon calls mind parasites, just collective illusions and neuroses, like manmade global warming. Indeed, the whole psychic current of leftism has become a sort of fluid structure that is almost impossible to eradicate. Put up a barrier, and just like water, it goes around it and takes on a new form. Marxists become "progressives," or reds turn green. Progressivism is never rooted in proper thought; to the contrary, it is a thought system imposed upon reality , like painting the sky or tattooing a beautiful woman.

As an example of where "unconscious" thought can take you, the image just popped into my head of Jesus walking on the water. What does this have to do with anything? Again, we don't yet know, but it feels to me as if this is a potentially fruitful thought, and that it is not just arbitrary or all wet. In short, it requires faith on my part that I can complete the thought and reach the end zone. Here we go again: Hail Mary, full of great ideas!

Recall that while Jesus is off huddling by himself and meditating on his mountaintop, the disciples set sail aboard a tiny ship. What begins as a three hour tour -- a three hour tour -- turns into a fateful trip, as the weather starts getting rough and the tiny ship is tossed. Frankly, if not for the receptivity of the faithful crew, the Minnow would be lost -- the Minnow would be lost.

A voice is heard: It is I, Gilligan: be not afraid.

Who is I? According to Tomberg, it is the I AM; the act of walking on water speaks to the fact that I AM is "not the one borne, but the bearer, not the one led, but the leader, not the one supported but the support." And this act is paralleled in "the wonder of pure faith, unsupported by anything but inner certainty, which stands above the threatening sea of relativity and doubt, and goes its own way." In short, faith is what floats your boat on its watery trek from the terrestrial to the celestial shore, or from birth to Birth. It is what allows one to complete the eternal pass into the sacred end zone.

We were born before the wind / Also younger than the sun / Ere the bonnie boat was won, as we sailed into the mystic / Hark now hear the sailors cry / Smell the sea and feel the sky / Let your soul and spirit fly, into the mystic --Van Morrison, Into the Mystic

True, we have to be here in this ocean in order to grow and evolve, but it's tempting to remain a land lubber and just hold onto terra firma. This is to remain a seed without water, a temptation that has a certain appeal, since to live without being sea'd is in a sense to remain in a state of infinite potential: so long as you are nothing, you are potentially anything and everything, just like an infant.

This is the appeal of the latest nothing, a titanic fissure of a man, a Barely Nobama, if that. Ah, the Mendacity of Hype. Now that he has become something, he's as guilty as the rest of us, and every bit as thoughtless. This dinghy is sinking fast.

Floating upstream alongside the ancient celestial trail, out from under the toilsome tablets of time, cast your I on the meager image below. So long. So short! Whoosh! There went your life, mate. Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding binding river empties to the sea. --The Coonifesto

Rare indeed is this human birth. The human body is like a boat, the first and foremost use of which is to carry us across the ocean of life and death to the shore of immortality. The Guru is the skillful helmsman; divine grace is the favorable wind. If with such means as these man does not strive to cross the ocean of life and death, he is indeed spiritually dead. --Srimad Bhagavatam