Cosmic Evolution and the Bridge to Gnowhere

So, cosmic evolution is as easy as One-two-three: first, the involution of conscious being into material existence and infinitely divisible substance; second, the emergence of that being into living and thinking form; and third, the ascent of thinking being into the free realization of the Divine reality.

Again, it is only because of the prior involution that there are relatively sharp developmental levels, or ontological planes, in between. However, one cannot necessarily be too concrete about these, and reify what is in reality a continuum. Or, at the very least, one must adopt the complementarity of modern physics, and view the scale as simultaneously particle and wave, or continuous and discrete.

To take an obvious example, I can see that my three and a-half year old son has gone through a number of clearly defined stages on his epic journey from embryo to boy. Nevertheless, if I were asked to pinpoint them, I could not do so -- any more than one could point out the day that the paleolithic became the neolothic, the Middle Ages became the Renaissance, or the Democrat party become so barbaric, abandoning liberalism for an illiberal and atavistic and intolerant leftism. Was it at with '68 convention? Was it the McGovern nomination? The ascendence of Jimmy Carter? Their racist "southern strategy" of bribing and duping blacks into voting against their interests? The full outbreak of Bush derangement? Or the even more marked poutbreak of Palin hysteria?

One point to consider is that, from a psychohistorical standpoint, the distance between 1968 and 2008 is truly the blink of an eye. Or, perhaps we are artificially divorcing the initial symptoms of a disease process from its end state -- like saying that the patient died of pneumonia, when it was actually AIDS. We know that life begins at conception, but when does spiritual death, or pneumania, begin? It also surely begins with a conception, but what is the concept? That's actually a fairly easy question, isn't it? After all, Genesis pretty much covers it.

Anyway. Because God exists, the ladder of being extends "all the way upwards from the Inconscient to the Supreme (as first it has gone all the way downwards)" (Van Vrekhem). Or, if you prefer, the existence of the Divine is proven by the fact of this descending ontological stairway to heathens. In short, you can't have others without the One (or vice versa).

Anti-intellectuals such as Queeg would like to enforce their fantasy on the rest of us, to the effect that All This -- all of it -- is merely a temporary result of the mighty god of chance -- which is just an inglorious coverup for their own spiritual blindness. Even worse, it elevates this myopia to just another form of vision, no better or worse than the Raccoon's 20/∞ geistsight, in that we can see from twenty feet what the unredeemed person can only see from the standpoint of eternity, or technically, "when they're dead."

Now, as we were saying yesterday, as the creation "pushes" from below, something else "descends" from above. Again, it is not as if human development is built in some mechanical or linear way, brick by brick. None of us has to reinvent the wheel of karma. Rather, it is anterior to us.

Furthermore, just as we celebrate the great explorers and pioneers of the past who "opened up" the material world and extended its frontiers, we also -- normal people, I mean -- revere the spiritual pioknowers who ventured further "upward" and inward for our benefit.

Because once a spiritual trail is blazed, it sets up a morphopneumatic groove, so to speak, so that others may follow into the jungle of Spirit. Evolution is nothing more than a "realized impossibilty," if you will (Van Vrekhem). But once you get used to it, it's rather fun to live an impossible life. For example, from the standpoint of my twenty year old scrub of a self, my present life was strictly impossible, even inconceivable. This is one reason I occasionally feel sorry for the atheists, since they will never know, much less live, the Great Impossible.

Surely it is no cooncidence that the same people who denigrate the great explorers of the past as nothing more than rapacious European colonialists, do the same thing with the great explorers of Spirit. Their antagonism to both is a testimoony to their hostility to the Adventure of Consciousness, which is only our reason for being herenow.

Think of your average ACLU member and spiritual pione'er-do-well. If he had his druthers, he would wipe out both Columbus and Jesus with one fallen swoop, since for him, they are reflections of the same disease. I'm sure they'd prefer to get rid of both Christmas and Columbus Day. Not to mention Independence Day, being that independence is an insult to dependent liberals. After all, why is there no Dependence Day to celebrate Ted Kennedy, Bill Ayers, Alec Baldwin, Deepak Chopra, Mark David Chapman, Huey Newton, Erica Jong, John Reed, Jane Fonda, Fidel Castro, and so many other liberal giants?

Yesterday I mentioned that the Palin Hysteria is far from meaningless, but another "sign o' the times." Aurobindo points out that a decisive evolutionary turn is often "preceded by an apparent emphasizing and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation." As a psychologist, this makes a great deal of sense to me, for it would be analogous to the ubiquitous "resistance" that flares up when the patient makes a move toward health. When a person stays within the narrow grooves dictated by their mind parasites, then the mind parasites leave them alone. But just try to grow beyond them, and these internal saboteurs begin to exert their muscle, flooding the mind with doubts, moods, and other kinds of attack, both internally and externally.

It seems that an evolutionary push "upward" will simultaneously elicit a response from "above" as well as "below." This again makes sense to me, as we want to plant our "spiritual foundation" as deeply into the Inconscient as possible. The existence of all these crazy liberals only proves that America's spiritual foundation is quite shaky at this time -- for the very reason that liberals have been so successful in eroding it.

Any spiritual person knows that you must master yourself before you should presume to master others. Liberals invert this precisely, and would like to impose a tyranny of people who cannot govern themselves, which quickly becomes a demockery. For example, this is why they are so proud of the fact that Obama attracts the young and stupid (HT Vanderleun), when this should be seen as a categorical indictment. Same with his endorsement by the international left.

To cite an example that is as fresh as this morning's news, look at what happens to a news cable network when you put a malignant narcissist with a Borderline Personality Disorder in charge. Being that the psyche of such a person is riven by primitive conflicts that exist as semi-autonomous parts split off from the core self, their subordinates will all try to adapt to one of the parts, which generates institutional chaos below. How does one adapt to a crazy person without the culture itself becoming crazy? The man at the top must be one, both internally and externally.

When Olbermann is eventually relieved of his duties, that's when the real stories of his madness will come out, for it will be like when the wicked witch dies in the Wizard of Oz. All of a sudden it is as if a spell is broken, and her minions instantly snap out of it. Instead of being angry at Dorothy, they are relieved. Trust me. Just watch what happens as Olbermann is stripped of his power to bully and intimidate others. They'll go Mussolini on his ass, and symbolically string him from the nearest lamp post with his genitals missing. As if you could tell.

Before cooncluding today's post, I'd like to jump ahead a bit and discuss the Next Stage in cosmic evolution. What will it look like? Sri Aurobindo called it the "higher mind," or "mind of light," which succeeds the rational mind (bear in mind that most humans -- even Americans -- have a long ways to go before they even stably achieve the latter). I would be particularly interested to know how many Raccoons are aware of their own mind of light, and whether or not they have noticed that it has become more developed through reading this blog on a daily basis. Don't worry, my feelings won't be hurt.

Here is how Aurobindo describes it: the higher mind is no longer a mingle of "light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit." Its basic substance is a more unified sense of being "capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge," often accompanied by awareness of "a spontaneous inherent knowledge." It is a "luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge," rooted in an awareness of the prior Oneness, before "the initiation of a separative knowledge." It is only a bridge, but a necessary one for explorers to build before others can pass over the abyss between matter and spirit.