The Center Right and the Peripheral Left

As mankind falls from plane to plane, we can see how realist man opens the door to vital man, for as Peggy Lee sang in one of the most world weary and cynical lyrics of all time,

If that's all there is my friends,
then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

If this is all there is, then let's have a ball. There is an age when doing so is appropriate, probably somewhat inevitable. You don’t want to prematurely disillusion a child’s innocent vitality and joyful engagement with the world. They’ll become disillusioned soon enough. If not, they will become pathetic, as they fall into the vital as a means of escape from boredem, meaninglessness, and the emptiness in the heart of one who has severed their contact with the divine planes.

Note that there is an infinite distinction between disillusionment and cynicism, for the former is to be painfully free of comforting illusions, while the latter is often to secretly long for them. I am quite sure Obama has the cynic vote locked up, demonstrating the credulousness in the heart of the cynic.

I can tell in an instant if I am dealing with a vital man, but it happens on such an intuitive level that I’ve never really put words to it. But the more you develop spiritually, the more you will recognize a gulf between yourself and this kind of person, because they will live out of a very different "center" than you do. In fact, they don't have a true center, more of a coagulated residue of the periphery. I hate to be so abstract.... How to explain....

A lot of it has to do with depth. For a two-dimensional person living in flatland, they can have no true depth. If you imagine a plane with a ball rolling over it, there will be no natural "place of rest." Rather, any resting place will be arbitrary. This is why, if you scratch the surface of these people, you will find either a kind of scattered and nonsensical world view, or else an artificially dense and hardened one that is impervious to reality (in its vertical sense). It is only a caricature of true interior coherence.

But if you add the dimension of depth, then you will see peaks and valleys in the landscape. I think of revelation as a deep valley in the mindscape, where the soul may find its genuine rest -- which is synonymous with finding our center and achieving a kind of paradoxically "dynamic serenity." You are all familiar with that feeling of when the cosmic tumblers line up and the soul snaps into place. The key, of course, is to follow that rabbit hole all the way down (or up and out), for it is at once "containing" and yet infinite and liberating.

I was just reading something along these lines in Perry's On Awakening & Remembering. When you think about it, the idea of the "center" is quite mysterious, and yet, we all implicitly recognize its existence.

In fact, human beings are the center of the creation, if considered vertically. In other words, in the scientistic view, there can be no center. But if you add the third dimension of developmental "height," then cosmic evolution results precisely in increased complexity and centration (or unity within diversity), until such a point is reached that a being emerges who can mirror the whole of creation. That would be us.

Thus, in a certain way, you could see the human being as a kind of central "point," out of which creation is projected or spreads out like a cone. We are "full" of the cosmos; which is why the cosmos is finite, while man's consciousness is infinite. The gross proceeds from the subtle. There are more potential songs, poems and paintings than there are stars in the sky.

Now that I think about it, the culture war -- of which the current political battle is just a reflection -- is really a cosmic battle over where the center is located. For leftist man there is no divine-human center. Rather, it is displaced to the collective, which creates only the false center of "opinion." But the essence of conservatism -- what we wish to conserve -- is man's transcendental center. The point of life is to live out of this center, and then pass it along to the next generation.

My generation, the boomers, declared war on this center, as they imagined that liberation would be found outside it, at the periphery. This resulted in a mass movement of radical subjectivity, or an independent herd of false centers, AKA, cosmic narcissism.

But as Perry points out, "Without the notion of the center, space and time lead to man's downfall -- space by scattering man's vital substance into a thousandfold variety of individual pursuits, and time by implacably dismantling everything he undertakes." "Liberated" from the Absolute, man is condemned to the relative, and therefore ultimate meaninglessness. The rest is just commentary, i.e., existentialism, scientism, Darwinism, deconstruction, masturbatory obamanism etc. His ascendence represents the consummation of nothing. If he makes you want to vomit, it's because he has reached the ralph nadir of American politics.

The coordinates of the center are located in the dimensions of truth, beauty, and virtue, as deployed and developed in the individual. This was the original purpose of a liberal education -- to dilate the being and allow these energies to enter and nourish the soul. But thanks the left, we have descended from the liberal uni-versity to the leftist di-versity, which encloses and deadens the soul in its petty world of grievance, radical subjectivity, and elaboration of this or that trivial detail at the expense of the whole. The entire dreary exercise is intrinsically materialistic and vitalistic, and results in the soul's gradual asphyxiation. As Perry explains,

"What is habitually concrete or real for man now is no longer the principle or the essence, but the materiality of the world which provides him with a dense or even an inverted sense of objectivity. And therefore, by a kind of vengefully compensatory reflex against the suffocation resulting in this opacity of reference points, subjectivity has parallely assumed an omnipotence whereby individual opinion becomes the de facto authority on all issues."

While the center is fluid and "alive," the periphery is associated with density and putrefaction. Note, for example, the invincible metaphysical density of our scientistic jester, which he will again demonstrate to us today. In its own weird way it is important, because it confirms everything we are discussing here.

It is as if leftist man first reduces the world to materiality, which in turn amplifies his most primitive way of knowing the world, which then ushers in his most base manner of living, i.e., Vital Man -- or a man not even worthy of his own manhood, for he refuses to ascend to it, or live up to himself. Reality recedes from him like a dream, and he dwells instead in the fantasy land of vital materialism. He will then spend his life on a fool's errand, searching for his missing parts where they can never be found. At best, he can experience fleeting pleasures, which give a pseudo-sense of the infinite while they are occurring. He never thinks of tracing them up to their source.

Incidentally, it does not matter whether a person is outwardly “religious,” because there are plenty of vital types who get involved in religion -- and not just exoteric religion. Even creepier are the vital beings who get involved in esoteric religion, for then you start to touch on the demonic -- the odious Deepak Chopra being a quintessential example.

Father Rose agrees that the fall into vitalism is at the heart of the reverse utopias of the left, which immamentize Christian hope and try to create a “vital heaven” on earth. For if higher truth is eclipsed as a result of “realism,” then leftism results from the flight from despair that such an erroneous and subhuman metaphysic entails.

Bear in mind that the spiritual impulse remains (as it must), but now it is no longer guided by traditional channels. It becomes “unhinged” so to speak. As Father Rose points out, “there is no form of Vitalism that is not naturalistic,” which again goes to the many pseudo-religions that are an expression of vitalism.

Here again, if you are remotely sensitive, you will notice this with regard to most “new age” spirituality, which is vital to the core, a cauldron of subjective fantasies, a “rootless eclecticism” of half-understood fragments, earth worship, narcissistic "realizationism," and sometimes frank satanism (even if unwitting). In reality, these pseudo-religions are “a cancer born of nihilism.” Again, Obama has their vote locked up, for the last thing a new-ager will endorse is reality.

Oops. Flat out of deep time. To be continued...