Spiral Bound

Here's another one of Bob's spiraling notebooks. Let's see what's in it. Hmm, you know what might be fun? To go in the closet and dig out some of the journals from twenty years ago, and see what was going on in Bob's fool head back then. Might prove to be very embarrassing, or at least a humbling experience. Damn, I should have done it for April Fools! I think he's going to get his fasting blood work done tomorrow morning. If so, maybe I can induce Dupree to rummage around in the closet while he's out. Call me his literary executioner.

Just remember, I'm not in charge of "quality control." That's not my job. I just throw a lot of stuff against the wall, so you can see what stinks. Anything with an asterisk means that Bob might have stolen it.

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What is this, some kind of riddle?: "Lower self is cross of true self. True self is cross of lower self." I think I get it. Eternity must "bear" time, just as time bears eternity at the crossroads of the vertical and horizontal. Sometimes the burden is unbearable, but in the end, eternity is in love with the productions of time. I hope.

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Man's real freedom is in the dimensions of height and depth.

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The scientist would have us believe that existence, life, and mind each required a series of miraculous accidents. We agree entirely, for they certainly weren't horizontal necessities. "Miraculous accident" is just another way of saying "vertical descent."

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Ever since language began colonizing the brain, it has been an unending task to synthesize all of these bits into a coherent self. It is possible to escape the animal nervous system with language, only to become trapped in language. As language is to the animal nervous system, metaphysics is to language.

Memes carve out a niche in mental space and reproduce there. When merged with the primitive superego, this becomes an agenda or ideology that partakes of a false timelessness.

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Is what the universe is converging upon less real than the converging parts? Is a face less real than the parts of which it is composed? Only the whole face allows us to "see" its within. The face is the meaning of its features, truly a "hole" in creation, perhaps the first point of entry into the great interior of Being. Humans "dwell in one another" in a manner inconceivable to other species, as it "bounds the infinite," thereby making it ponderable. It is one of the many reasons I don't believe in extra-terrestrial life or artificial intelligence, for their proponents have no appreciation of the unique indwelling and intersubjectivity of the human state.

This is one of the crimes of the Islamic world, for to cover the female face is to annihilate personal identity, the unique within and the reason foe being. Leftists do the same thing by forcing you to see a "person of color" or other various group designations instead of a unique individual. It is a faceless ideology, especially when taken to its logical extreme, e.g. Cuba, Soviet Union, Berkeley, etc. "Diversity" is never diversity of individuals, but of groups, which by definition deny individuality. For example, "blackness" is seen as essential instead of accidental.

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Leftist intellectuals sow their seeds, while the poor reap the bitter harvest. The left tries to eliminate existential tensions, while the conservative liberal has learned to harness and exploit them, e.g., through the free market. Something similar is done with regard to the spiritual life, e.g., one cannot eliminate sexual tension through promiscuity and "sexual liberation," but one can certainly transpose it to a higher key through spiritual union, i.e., marriage of souls, which embodies the eternal play of the cosmic male and female principles.

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To integrate particulars is to interiorize. There can be no mere "external" synthesis. Wherever we see deep coherence, it is evidence of interiority. What we call "deconstruction" is only beneficial if it dismantles a false synthesis into its particulars for the purpose of a more intense and meaningful union, not as an end in itself, for it is certainly possible to impose a false whole that denies the particulars (which the left habitually enforces through various mechanisms of political, academic, and media correctness). But in practice, it is almost always a secular destruction, not a spiritual synthesis. It is the embodiment of the satanic principle which "flees" from O, from the center to the periphery. This is how and why deconstruction is the all-purpose tool of leftist tools. You can use it to convince yourself of anything.

The true individual is freedom lived.*

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Music also has a "within," which is indeed the key to its mystery and appeal. Music reveals to us the within of time in its most abstract sense, in that it is unity-in-flowing diversity mirrored in the mind that "holds" it. Some minds can hold much more than others, both musically and cosmically. Scientism reduces the grandeur of the Cosmic Suite to a three-minute pop tune that anyone can play.

Revelation reveals the within of the Creator. To see God's face would be to see eternity. "No one can see my face and live." But one can die before one dies, then seeing is believing: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matt 5:8); They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads (Rev: 22:4). Some people saw Jesus' face and therefore saw the Within, while some see and do not see. But blessed are those who don't see and yet believe, for they have 20/20 foresight.

Faith is dwelling in the particulars, confident in the foreknowledge that their meaning will be revealed. It is "knowledge of an approaching discovery," meaning that one somehow already possesses the knowledge one seeks. "Clues" can only exist if we already know what they point towards. Is this why the left is so clueless about religion?

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When you try to teach something you don't really understand, you just pass along the parts. Someone will then have to assemble them. Still, this is preferable to passing along a confident ignorance of the Whole. To paraphrase Schuon, when a man pretends to an understanding he doesn't possess, it jeopardizes what little valid knowledge he does possess. One obviously sees this pattern writ large in the atheistic/secular mind, but also in self-appointed "spiritual teachers" who go way beyond their competence to pronounce on all manner of topics of which they know nothing.

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Life is to matter as mind is to brain and God is to existence.

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If the mind didn't exist, we'd have no trouble explaining it.

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Getting paid for what comes naturally is like a self-replicating dollar bill.*

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Spiritual practice: arranging your own birth.

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We must become metaphysically fit in order to be missionaries capable of the arduous journey from the future to the present.

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Al Gore embodies the "hyperlucidity of the irrational," Bill Clinton the infectiousness of the shameless.

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Bill & Hillary: Slimese twins.

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Writing: What we give back to eternity in exchange for time.*

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If President Bush voluntarily relinquishes his fascist theocracy in January 2009, he will be the greatest man who has ever lived.