The Origin and Center of the Human State

Why did this pop into my melon while making my coffee this morning? As Bertie Wooster would say, it's not the sort of thing one springs on a lad with a morning head. But it must have been an artifact of a passing thoughtlet I had yesterday, to the effect that for the radical secularist, they will have all sorts of beliefs, but none of the beliefs can fit together in any integral way, or be justified in any ultimate sense. It will all just be ad hoc and disconnected, with no possibility of unity. I would find such a situation completely unsatisfying intellectually, let alone spiritually. I wouldn't -- and didn't -- give up until I had found the missing unity from which it all emanates, revolves around, and returns.

For example, let's say we have a simpleminded secular person who believes in the literal truth of Darwinism. But he also believes, say, in monogamous marriage. Why? How do you square that circle in any kind of necessary way, as opposed to an arbitrary way? You can't. You just live a fractured existence and don't think about all of the cracks in its foundation.

Or, what if you believe there is no intrinsic difference between animals and humans, but you also believe we shouldn't be allowed to marry the former or eat the latter. Why? On what basis? Homosexuals often argue that they should be allowed to marry because one occasionally sees animals of the same "gender" going at it. But we also see some monkeys eat babies. Can we infer from this that it is acceptable to consume our young?

Or, let us say, we have a typical soul-damaged ACLU activist who spends his meaningless life trying to efface any remnant of our precious Judeo-Christian heritage. Eventually, if he is persistent enough, he will sniff out the very source of the problem, which is that our rights derive from the Creator. As such, we are only Americans in any intrinsically meaningful sense to the extent that there is a Creator. No Creator, no America or Americans. Or, if we are just Americans in the absence of the Creator, then we are just like any other nation, in which our rights come from the state, and we in turn become serfs instead of real men who are free to live from the Center of being, from the inside out, or from O-->(n).

None of this should be seen as remotely abstract. Rather, it is as concrete as can be, as are the implications. For example, the wicked Deepak never tires of criticizing the United Stated as uniquely evil, a place run by deluded Christian fundamentalists. Most recently, this pompously crude and illiterate evil clown (and for the existential implications of evil clowns, please read Dusty's comment at the end of the previous thread) wrote of how the people who hate the United States for our imperialistic war against Iraq are entirely justified in doing so, and that we need to humble ourselves before the democrazy of world opinion.

One of the problems with the left is that they are so casually hyperbolic in their use of language (an effect of having no moral center), that when the real thing comes along, they don't have the words for it. For example, if one is a racist for believing that Obama is a vapid celebrity, what do you call an actual racist? Likewise, when a real imperial war of aggression occurs, such as the one we are seeing between Russia and Georgia, what do you call it? Because if it's no different than Bushitler's invasion of Iraq, then there's no need for concern, is there? As soon as Georgia is capable of defending itself against internal and external enemies, Putin will pull out and let them live autonomously and independently. No problem.

At the same time, Deepak is so morally depraved that his moronic blog defends China. Those of us who are critical of its human rights record are really just annoyed because China "does not toe our line." We are just victims of "stupidity, ignorance, foolishness, and pure dumbness."

Let's get back to the the simpleminded secularist, who doesn't trouble himself with developing a coherent metaphysic. As we all know, he lives in the soil of Judeo-Christian values, even while polluting and poisoning it with his infertile fertilizer, or worthless B.S. I sometimes wonder if the global warming hoax is an unconscious projection of this process. In other words, secularists are making the planet more and more uninhabitable for the human soul, but imagine that the problem has something to do with material reality (since they deny spiritual reality).

It very much reminds me of a depressed person who is in denial of their depression. Such a person will inevitably feel physically ill, with low energy and lots of aches and pains, but they will call it something else, like "fibromyalgia" or "chronic fatigue" or "myofascial pain" (not that these things don't occasionally exist; only that, in my experience, the problem is usually depression). In other words, they misrecognize the psychic and project it onto the field of the body.

It seems that the collective left -- being that they a priori deny the soul -- misrecognize their resultant spiritual pain and emptiness, and instead weep for the earth. In turn, because they cannot recognize evil (and in fact usually deny it altogether), they inevitably call things evil that are manifestly not evil. But in fact, in order to be conistent, if global warming is real, then by any standard, Al Gore or John Edwards are deeply evil people, given the massive sizes of their carbon footprints. Or, put it this way: I'll start to believe in global warming when Al Gore takes it seriously enough to live as simply as I do.

Now, cultures do not evolve -- and could never have evolved -- in the manner of disjointed secular materialist projection. Rather, they evolve organically, with everything a reflection of everything else, both vertically and horizontally. In fact, I remember Schuon saying something to the effect that traditional cultures... here, let me find it. I don't trust my morning head to get it right.

"The whole existence of... traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin. In the spatial world where we live, every value is related in some way to a sacred Center, which is the place where Heaven has touched the earth; in every human world there is a place where God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace. And it is the same for the Origin, which is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial; but in the case of civilizations having a historical founder, it is also the period when God spoke, thus renewing the primordial covenant for the branch of humanity concerned."

Beautiful. Note what happens when secularists ever attempt to create a new or improved culture from the top down, as in the French Revolution: chaos. It generates chaos because it is completely manmade and arbitrary, and is detached from the very soil that makes the secularist possible. In other words, the secularist is just one of the possibilities of a Judeo-Christian culture that values the sanctity of the individual, who can become whatever he wishes, even if it means cashing in his humanness. But we should not stand by idly and allow them to turn our beautiful civilization upside-down just because they have no contact with its Center and Origin.

Look at this mess of a post. I've gotten completely derailed from the point I wanted to make -- you know, the thought that popped into my head while making my coffee. So let's return to the Center and Origin of this post, which was this: We all know that the simpleminded secular atheist or lizard is paradoxically proud of his meaningless intellect, believing himself to live in the world of "science," "logic," "objectivity," etc., while we religious types live in our supposedly comforting myths and fairy tales. Fair enough.

I remember Einstein, a Princeton professor of some note, saying something to the effect that for the physicist, time cannot ultimately be real. Rather, it is only a "stubborn illusion," a side effect, as it were, of a more fundamental reality that is atemporal. Okay, fine. That makes no sense, but a lot of things about modern physics make no sense to our reason or our experience. Because if it is true, nothing is really happening, including the statement that it isn't. At the very least, we could never say that "this temporal state" is more valuable than "that temporal state." Rather, all temporal states are of equal value, just different arrangements of value-neutral energy. It would be like saying that this ripple on the water is better than that one. If you've seen one ripple, you've seen them all.

But for the Darwinist, time is anything but a "stubborn illusion." Rather, it is everything, given that time is the "place" where evolution plays out. In other words, as we discussed a couple of posts back, Darwinian evolution presupposes the reality of time, which is intrinsically irreversible (even if they refuse to concede that it is also developmental, which it most assuredly is). In Darwinian time, 2 plus 2 equals four, but 4 minus 2 can never get you back to two, any more than you can actually reverse the aging process. And they don't really have any idea of how 2 plus 2 gets to 5 (or monkey + monkey = human), but that's a subject for a different post.

So how do we reconcile the reality of time with the reality of physics? I mean, I know how I do it, but how does the simpleminded secularist? For example, the Raccoon knows that evolution is developmental for the very reason that there is a cosmic Center and Origin (non)located on the vertical plane. For this reason, we know that the human state is superior to the animal state, and that life is "higher" than matter. But for the physicist, there isn't even any way to identify any fundamental difference between living and non-living matter. Rather, life is simply a relatively rare configuration of matter, but that is all.

Likewise, for the Darwinist, the human is just a relatively rare kind of animal. Whatever he is, it can all be reduced to his animal nature, whatever that is, just as life can be reduced to energy, whatever that is. So the secularist ultimately adheres to the philosophy of "whatever." Get him to acknowledge and articulate his first principles, and you will indeed discover that they are "whatever," or "chit happens."

But seriously, folks. How does chit happen? Let's leave to one side the question of how existence happens. What we really want to know is how existence becomes experience, how experience becomes truth, and how truth may know the Absolute. It may do so because Truth is a declension from the Absolute, not another arbitrary state of physics or a result of random genetic errors.