I'm not sure if that title has anything to do with this post. It just popped into my head this morning, and now I'm inflicting it on you. Nevertheless, it's obviously true. As someone recently said -- I forget who, at the moment -- when Pakistan falls and al Qaeda gets its eager hands on the nuclear arsenal, whom do you want in the White House? Let's not kid ourselves. We all know who Satan would prefer to be tremulously wedged in the Big Chair, blinking nervously at the Joint Chiefs.
The XVth card of the tarot, The Devil, introduces us "to the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration."
But before proceeding further, let us take to heart the warning of our Unknown Friend (heretofore UF), who cautions us that "One can grasp profoundly, i.e. intuitively, only that which one loves. Love is the vital element of profound knowledge, intuitive knowledge." If you have ever wondered why true evil -- nazi evil, Islamist evil -- is so impenetrable, it is because the normal person obviously cannot love evil: "Evil is therefore unknowable in its essence. One can understand it only at a distance, as an observer of its phenomenology."
I suppose another way of saying it is that (in linguistic terms) "evil" is a signifier with no signified, being that true evil represents a genuine absence -- an absence or deprivation of the Good. As such, the essence of evil is that it has no essence.
In turn, this is why evil is truly a "bottomless pit." It is not actually infinite, since only the Absolute can be infinite. It does, however, tend toward its own kind of "false" or "bad" infinite (in the Hegelian sense), which is why man can only rise so high but can fall and fall without ever hitting bottom. I suppose the physics of black holes might provide a handy way to think about this negative infinity. This would be easier -- and less spiritually dangerous -- than trying to imagine, say, the bottomless darkness of the Berkeley City Council. Some things are so beyond the horizon of the human imagination, that they are best left alone.
UF goes on to say that in comparison to the luminous worlds of the celestial hierarchy, the world of evil is more "like a luxuriant jungle, where you can certainly, if necessary, distinguish hundreds and thousands of particular plants, but where you can never attain to a clear view of the totality." Do you know what he means? I do. It's like a collection with no ordering principle, just a blob or agglomeration -- which is the opposite of the Life principle, i.e., that which organizes, unifies, and synthesizes. Dynamic wholeness is the essence of Life, which means that evil and death must be related to dispersal and fragmentation. Thus, "the world of evil is a chaotic world -- at least, such as it presents itself to the observer."
Vertically speaking, order is "up," while chaos is down. No surprise there. In Genesis, God's first act is simply to separate. Without separation there is only the formless void of primordial chaos. If you don't understand the holiness and the sacredness of Separation, then you don't understand anything. Yes, this separation, or duality, can be transcended, but only from above, never from below. Better to live in Holy duality than to obliterate divinely ordained distinctions out of a self-deluded belief in bogus transcendence, which is what the "new age" is all about.
As is leftism, which might just as well be called "down syndrome," being that it is rooted in the anti-divine principle of blending. For the left, In the Beginning was Order. Now, let us gleefully tear it down and blend darkness with light, the upper waters with the lower waters! Examples are too numerous to mention, but one would have to include the obliteration of sexual differences, the trivialization of generational differences, and the effacement of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom; not to mention the conflation of transcendence and immanence, the con-fusion of moral relativism, and the abysmal fall into multiculturalism. All of these trends are evil to the core, despite the paradoxical absence of a core. Again, evil is essentially without essence. It is perpetually going from nowhere to nothing, while enjoying the... what's the word, Jeeves? Yes, the frisson of the fall.
Now, just as the right kind of obedience is freedom -- for example, fidelity to Truth -- the wrong kind of freedom is slavery. According to UF, one of the subtexts of the Devil card is that of slavery, in that it depicts a man and woman bound by the neck to a much larger androgynous entity.
Interestingly, just as the union of male and female can create the miracle of a baby to raise (and who shall in turn raise them in mysterious ways), it seems that a false kind of blending of their essences can engender another kind of being that shall lower them, so to speak. As UF explains, the card has to do with "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them. It is the Arcanum of creation of artificial beings and of the slavery into which the creator can fall -- becoming a slave of his own creation."
Let's pause here for a moment. In this regard, I can remember the precise moment when I crossed over that line from leftist back to liberal (i.e., conservative); or, to put it another way, when it was no longer possible to be on the left. I simply asked myself, "who is responsible for my existential unhappiness?" I won't go into all of the details, as that would take us down a lengthy detour. But the point is, I realized that I was a slave of my own creation -- for example, an evil creation I called "Ronald Reagan." Of course, my creation had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual Ronald Reagan. Rather -- and this is critical -- not only was it my creation, but it was me. Just as in a dream, I was persecuted by my own elaborate production -- like the spider who lives in a web spun from its own substance.
I was reminded of this again last night in reading the liner notes to the new edition of Donald Fagen's excellent Nightfly Trilogy (nothing I'm about to say detracts from the music). As much as I appreciate Steely Dan (Becker & Fagen), like most people of their generation, their jaded cynicism does not extend to their own default moonbattery, which sits there like a kind of unexamined Holy Writ. Which it is. It is the genesis myth of the Baby Boom generation -- the idea that the evil is Out There in the Nixonian uncool ones who are oppressing us.
I know exactly what Fagen means when he reflects that "to a weekend hippie in the '60s," political paranoia "seemed kind of exciting." Indeed, for me, this was the appeal of a Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn -- that they provided a kind of secret gnostic knowledge, an alternative conspiracy theory that explained everything -- why the world is so off-kilter and out of joint, and more to the point, why I was so unfulfilled. Ronald Reagan hates me!
It's one thing to think this way in the '60s. But it is rather pathetic to still think it in one's 60s, as Fagen apparently does. He's still haunted by his self-generated demons -- i.e., mind parasites -- which have now appropriated the host, as suggested in the liner notes of the dark and dystopian world of Morph the Cat, released in 2006 (especially when compared to the idealism and optimism of Nightfly). As he writes,
"Paranoia just wasn't fun anymore in the age of al Qaeda." But not because of al Qaeda! Rather, he speaks disparagingly of Republicans taking over his city (New York) at the 2002 convention, and ends his notes with the following warning: "If you see some folks who believe that spirits and ghosts and hell actually exist and they're really sure about it and they're comin' your way -- RUN!"
I agree entirely. Better yet, just wake up from the dream, because you can't actually run away from your own ghosts, much less the Dreamer.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Devil, Dylan, and the Dead (3.08.09)
I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn't a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad. --Bob Dylan
Let's meditate for awhile on the political implications of the Devil card with our Unknown Friend.
First of all, the being known as Satan is a source of inspiration (to in-spire is to receive spirit). Only it is counter-inspiration, which is still a kind of inspiration. In fact, very much so. To avoid premature saturation, let's just call it (-i). Most of us, assuming we weren't permanently damaged by college, can recognize (i) when we see it, but many people confuse (i) with (-i), with catastrophic results. For example, America's founders were animated by (i). Che Guevara -- and those who idealize him -- was animated by (-i).
In contemporary America, you could almost say that there's no such thing as "the left." Rather, what we have is a mass movement animated by (-i). If you are within the movement, then it is doubtful that you can see it, but viewed from without, it is completely obvious. The campaign of John Edwards, for example, was an exercise in pure (-i). How then did it differ from Obama's campaign? I would say that the Edwards campaign was equally driven by (+H), whereas Obama's campaign is imbued with a meretricious (-L). True, there is always deep (H) under the (-L), but the obamaniacs are able to split off and deny the (H) by bathing in the (-L).
Along these lines, reader Mike M. left an astute comment yesterday:
"This swooning Obama-worship of what would seem an empty suit is bizarre and curious. Note how it follows the irrational demonization of the current POTUS now seen as a figure of such mythic evil that he, George Bush, is held to have deliberately murdered thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11 as a pretext for immoral imperialist war. This is a view which is resolutely held by graduates of our most prestigious universities! That such an event would have no historical precedent and that such a purported crime would exceed the ruthless cynical evil of the purported NAZI burning of the Reichstag cannot be without meaning....
"Given the powerful projection, scapegoating and displacement poured into the demonization of George W. Bush could it be that this Obamessiah personna is a necessary counter to the fabricated evil Bush-Hitler figure, and the powerful divisive hysteria and paranoia which has accompanied the demonization of George Bush -- sort of virtual particle and anti-particles emerging from a spiritual vacuum?"
Yes. That is exactly what I am trying to say. Genuine (L) is convergent upon wholeness, truth, beauty, light, harmony, and peace. It is not reactive, but active. On the other hand, the Obama-love (-L) is almost wholly reactive, as it exists side by side with the (H) from which it is derived. This is one of the first and most useful things I learned in my psychoanalytic education. That is, some patients will develop a transference toward the therapist in which they express a lot of anger and hatred. No problem. One expects that. They are not nearly as troublesome as the ones who develop an idealized transference, because when that happens, you had better fasten your seatbelt. You're in for a bumpy ride.
The reason for this is that idealization (understood in its psychoanalytic sense) is a defense mechanism which is simply the other side of denigration and contempt. In other words, both idealization and contempt are simply ways for the person to manage their own psychic economy. You might say that one person places the bad object outside of himself in order to distance himself from it, while another person places the good object outside of himself to protect it from his own toxic anger and hatred. Often, on an unconscious level, the patient idealizes you to prevent themselves from tearing you apart -- i.e., to protect you from their own hostility. Haven't you ever been around this kind of person, whose attraction to you was kind of spooky? (I remember a Seinfeld episode that dealt with that issue.)
Importantly, this is not to confuse the defense mechanism of idealization with its normal variety. It's somewhat difficult to precisely define the difference, but you can definitely sense when it's the pathological kind. As a therapist, you can intuit the shadow underneath, which gives you an apprehensive feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. You find yourself with a foreboding sense of, "boy, this guy loves me now, but am I gonna get hammered as soon as I do something to disappoint him." I guess it's similar to the creepy signals that an abusive man gives out to a potential victim. When a woman gets involved with an abusive man, it's usually because she ignored the spooky idealization at the beginning of the relationship. And the reason she ignored it was probably because she wasn't loved by a virtuous and spiritually integrated father, so she can't recognize proper male love.
This is why I mentioned yesterday that a normal person would definitely be unnerved by the kind of hysterical adulation (-L) being directed at Obama. You cannot help wondering about the state of his soul, and whether it is a pathological mirror-image of what is being projected into him -- like an unconscious lock that corresponds perfectly with the projected key. Such a man, like Clinton, seeks his center in the periphery of the idealizing crowd, so to speak. It couldn't be more different from a man with an immutable axis and incorruptible center to which people are "magnetized," such as Ronald Reagan.
(George Will: "In his preternatural neediness, Clinton, an overflowing caldron of narcissism and solipsism, is still smarting from Obama's banal observation, four weeks ago, that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative president than Clinton.")
If mother love is like the circle that is both infinite and enveloping (and potentially suffocating), father love is like the absolute point. The circle must come first, followed by the point, which forms the center (and which will in turn extend "vertically" to the celestial Father, of whom our earthly father is just an authorized deputy). A man without a father (or father energy, which can come from other sources) is generally a man without a center. In addition to seeking his center in the adulation of others, it is also possible to fabricate it in a kind of centerless, manic energy -- again, Clinton comes to mind. He is bubbling over with scattered hysterical thought devoid of any coherence or consistency. He is most focussed when he is focused on the adulation of the crowd, which provides him with a faux center and a temporary integration. But it's an addiction, which is why he can't leave politics alone.
There is a fascinating chapter in Dylan's autobiography, in which he discusses at length the horror of being idealized in the manner he was back in the 1960s. Again, our society has become so narcissistic, that not only is such a bizarre situation seen as normative, but it is something that people actively seek (i.e., the cult of celebrity). People want to be famous and adulated, but obviously for all the wrong reasons. There few good reasons to be famous. Which is why, as Dennis Prager says, most famous people are utterly insignificant, while most significant people aren't famous. I am also reminded of something Schuon said, that the spiritually normal man does things because they please God, not for the horizontal affirmation of others. He made a related comment about the purpose of secular humanism, which is "to make oneself as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible."
I can't help wondering if Obama's absence of a father is a critical element here. If a boy is not initiated by the love of a virtuous man, then he will remain left behind in the murky, oceanic, intoxicating, boundary-less realm of mother love, which is as different from father-love as night is to day or sun is to moon. Please bear in mind that I am in no way denigrating mother love. Indeed, in watching Mrs. G. interact with Future Leader over the past three years, I am more in awe of it than ever. However, I am equally aware (as is Mrs. G) that if this love weren't tempered by father love, we could have a real monster on our hands. I mean really.
Awhile back Hoarhey made an insightful comment to the effect that the country wasn't prepared to cope with another fatherless president working out his issues on the national stage. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that the country chose a feminized, mother-bound man as president after the conclusion of the Cold War, since father had done his job and was therefore felt to be no longer necessary. But now, in a time of hot war, are we naive enough -- or in such denial -- to think that we can cow our enemies with sufficient mother love? (c.f. here and here.)
Yes. We. Can.
Yes. We. Can.
Yes. We. Can.
Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, the Islamists love me.
Hey, I never really got around to discussing the Devil card. Oh well, some other time.
A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, "And here he is... take him, you know him, he's yours." I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in that introduction.... What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now.
.... [T]he press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing new songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. --Bob Dylan
Let's meditate for awhile on the political implications of the Devil card with our Unknown Friend.
First of all, the being known as Satan is a source of inspiration (to in-spire is to receive spirit). Only it is counter-inspiration, which is still a kind of inspiration. In fact, very much so. To avoid premature saturation, let's just call it (-i). Most of us, assuming we weren't permanently damaged by college, can recognize (i) when we see it, but many people confuse (i) with (-i), with catastrophic results. For example, America's founders were animated by (i). Che Guevara -- and those who idealize him -- was animated by (-i).
In contemporary America, you could almost say that there's no such thing as "the left." Rather, what we have is a mass movement animated by (-i). If you are within the movement, then it is doubtful that you can see it, but viewed from without, it is completely obvious. The campaign of John Edwards, for example, was an exercise in pure (-i). How then did it differ from Obama's campaign? I would say that the Edwards campaign was equally driven by (+H), whereas Obama's campaign is imbued with a meretricious (-L). True, there is always deep (H) under the (-L), but the obamaniacs are able to split off and deny the (H) by bathing in the (-L).
Along these lines, reader Mike M. left an astute comment yesterday:
"This swooning Obama-worship of what would seem an empty suit is bizarre and curious. Note how it follows the irrational demonization of the current POTUS now seen as a figure of such mythic evil that he, George Bush, is held to have deliberately murdered thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11 as a pretext for immoral imperialist war. This is a view which is resolutely held by graduates of our most prestigious universities! That such an event would have no historical precedent and that such a purported crime would exceed the ruthless cynical evil of the purported NAZI burning of the Reichstag cannot be without meaning....
"Given the powerful projection, scapegoating and displacement poured into the demonization of George W. Bush could it be that this Obamessiah personna is a necessary counter to the fabricated evil Bush-Hitler figure, and the powerful divisive hysteria and paranoia which has accompanied the demonization of George Bush -- sort of virtual particle and anti-particles emerging from a spiritual vacuum?"
Yes. That is exactly what I am trying to say. Genuine (L) is convergent upon wholeness, truth, beauty, light, harmony, and peace. It is not reactive, but active. On the other hand, the Obama-love (-L) is almost wholly reactive, as it exists side by side with the (H) from which it is derived. This is one of the first and most useful things I learned in my psychoanalytic education. That is, some patients will develop a transference toward the therapist in which they express a lot of anger and hatred. No problem. One expects that. They are not nearly as troublesome as the ones who develop an idealized transference, because when that happens, you had better fasten your seatbelt. You're in for a bumpy ride.
The reason for this is that idealization (understood in its psychoanalytic sense) is a defense mechanism which is simply the other side of denigration and contempt. In other words, both idealization and contempt are simply ways for the person to manage their own psychic economy. You might say that one person places the bad object outside of himself in order to distance himself from it, while another person places the good object outside of himself to protect it from his own toxic anger and hatred. Often, on an unconscious level, the patient idealizes you to prevent themselves from tearing you apart -- i.e., to protect you from their own hostility. Haven't you ever been around this kind of person, whose attraction to you was kind of spooky? (I remember a Seinfeld episode that dealt with that issue.)
Importantly, this is not to confuse the defense mechanism of idealization with its normal variety. It's somewhat difficult to precisely define the difference, but you can definitely sense when it's the pathological kind. As a therapist, you can intuit the shadow underneath, which gives you an apprehensive feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. You find yourself with a foreboding sense of, "boy, this guy loves me now, but am I gonna get hammered as soon as I do something to disappoint him." I guess it's similar to the creepy signals that an abusive man gives out to a potential victim. When a woman gets involved with an abusive man, it's usually because she ignored the spooky idealization at the beginning of the relationship. And the reason she ignored it was probably because she wasn't loved by a virtuous and spiritually integrated father, so she can't recognize proper male love.
This is why I mentioned yesterday that a normal person would definitely be unnerved by the kind of hysterical adulation (-L) being directed at Obama. You cannot help wondering about the state of his soul, and whether it is a pathological mirror-image of what is being projected into him -- like an unconscious lock that corresponds perfectly with the projected key. Such a man, like Clinton, seeks his center in the periphery of the idealizing crowd, so to speak. It couldn't be more different from a man with an immutable axis and incorruptible center to which people are "magnetized," such as Ronald Reagan.
(George Will: "In his preternatural neediness, Clinton, an overflowing caldron of narcissism and solipsism, is still smarting from Obama's banal observation, four weeks ago, that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative president than Clinton.")
If mother love is like the circle that is both infinite and enveloping (and potentially suffocating), father love is like the absolute point. The circle must come first, followed by the point, which forms the center (and which will in turn extend "vertically" to the celestial Father, of whom our earthly father is just an authorized deputy). A man without a father (or father energy, which can come from other sources) is generally a man without a center. In addition to seeking his center in the adulation of others, it is also possible to fabricate it in a kind of centerless, manic energy -- again, Clinton comes to mind. He is bubbling over with scattered hysterical thought devoid of any coherence or consistency. He is most focussed when he is focused on the adulation of the crowd, which provides him with a faux center and a temporary integration. But it's an addiction, which is why he can't leave politics alone.
There is a fascinating chapter in Dylan's autobiography, in which he discusses at length the horror of being idealized in the manner he was back in the 1960s. Again, our society has become so narcissistic, that not only is such a bizarre situation seen as normative, but it is something that people actively seek (i.e., the cult of celebrity). People want to be famous and adulated, but obviously for all the wrong reasons. There few good reasons to be famous. Which is why, as Dennis Prager says, most famous people are utterly insignificant, while most significant people aren't famous. I am also reminded of something Schuon said, that the spiritually normal man does things because they please God, not for the horizontal affirmation of others. He made a related comment about the purpose of secular humanism, which is "to make oneself as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible."
I can't help wondering if Obama's absence of a father is a critical element here. If a boy is not initiated by the love of a virtuous man, then he will remain left behind in the murky, oceanic, intoxicating, boundary-less realm of mother love, which is as different from father-love as night is to day or sun is to moon. Please bear in mind that I am in no way denigrating mother love. Indeed, in watching Mrs. G. interact with Future Leader over the past three years, I am more in awe of it than ever. However, I am equally aware (as is Mrs. G) that if this love weren't tempered by father love, we could have a real monster on our hands. I mean really.
Awhile back Hoarhey made an insightful comment to the effect that the country wasn't prepared to cope with another fatherless president working out his issues on the national stage. In fact, it is probably no coincidence that the country chose a feminized, mother-bound man as president after the conclusion of the Cold War, since father had done his job and was therefore felt to be no longer necessary. But now, in a time of hot war, are we naive enough -- or in such denial -- to think that we can cow our enemies with sufficient mother love? (c.f. here and here.)
Yes. We. Can.
Yes. We. Can.
Yes. We. Can.
Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, the Islamists love me.
Hey, I never really got around to discussing the Devil card. Oh well, some other time.
A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, "And here he is... take him, you know him, he's yours." I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in that introduction.... What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now.
.... [T]he press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing new songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. --Bob Dylan
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Abomination of an Obama Nation (3.07.09)
Will brought up a very important point in a comment yesterday. It was in response to my questions, "What great world-historical events are invisible to the jaded elites of the present? What great vertical energies are entering the world today, undetected by a spiritually oblivious mainstream media?" Will's reflections on this are worth reproducing in full:
"There is a danger here, I think, given that this might be the age when 'Spirit pours out on all flesh,' i.e., the vertical energies actually do become, in a way, more visible, more tangible, even to the oblivious MSM.
"The danger is this: the influx of vertical energies for the most part cannot find suitable spiritual anchoring, do not result in a growth of spiritual insight and wisdom, but rather the vertical energies might be suborned by the horizontal in an entirely unwholesome way.
"An example: hypothetically speaking, let's say... oh, let's say, some political candidate who's running for... oh, let's say, for president of the United States... Let's say this candidate uses the influx of vertical energy in such a way that it does not invest him (or her, let's be fair) with any particular wisdom -- in fact, this candidate mouths and apparently believes in the same old amorphous lefty platitudes. Only... this candidate seems invested with a peculiar type of charisma that has citizens from coast to coast virtually swooning in some orgasmystic ecstasy... no one's higher intellect is sharpened, only their *feelings* are set on fire by this candidate in some peculiar way...
"Well, as was said re: the days when the Spirit pours out on all flesh, one must be very careful not to fall for false messiahs and whatnot... meanwhile, there are those who indeed are spiritually anchoring the vertical energy influx and are doing so invisibly and with a certain amount of travail, as is necessary at this time."
***
First of all, let's get this out of the way at the outset. Are we calling Obama the antichrist?
Yes, or course.
No, wait -- let's not engage in ad obominem. Let's just say an embodiment of the antichristic principle. Let's discuss this in terms of abstract cosmic principles, without getting personal. No need to demonize someone just because he's an instrument of satan. He's just the vehicle, not the driver.
Now, what do we mean by "antichrist?" I would say that, as Christ is Word-made-flesh, the antichristic would analogously represent the "lower principle" made flesh -- the instantiation, as it were, of the Fall.
So first of all, to go along with my analysis, you must believe that man is in some sense a fallen being with a built-in -- or at least inevitable -- flaw. You don't have to be a fanatic about it. You only have to know that "something ain't right" with the earthlings, however you wish to conceptualize it. Being aware of this principle is our greatest inoculation against utopian leftist schemes to perfect mankind, which always result in unanticipated cosmic belowback.
Secondly, you would have to believe that it is possible for the forces responsible for the Fall to be personified -- or, let us say, both focused and dispersed like a beam of darkness through the concavity or convexations of man's heart. As Christ is a blinding light, antichrist would be darkness visible. Thus, to those who live in spiritual darkness, it would appear as a false light -- as, say, a single match is brighter than the sun in an enclosed room, cut off from the sun.
The Serpent, to paraphrase our Unknown Friend in Meditations on the Tarot, symbolizes advanced intelligence ("the most cunning of the beasts") turned wholly toward the horizontal. Thus, it is a perversion of man's intellect, as it represents a self-sufficient naturalism and total (small r) realism that betrays the vertical source of human intelligence. As such, we would expect one aspect of the antichrist to be high intelligence combined with extraordinary vapidity, at least to those with spiritual discernment.
But this cannot merely be the philosophical vapidity of the doctrinaire atheist or scientistic materialist, or it could never gain traction in the human heart, which always hungers for spirit, even if it is the false kind. Rather, it would have to come cloaked in some sort of seductive or hypnotic faux verticality. It would indeed have to be charismatic and charming, bearing in mind the root meaning of former, which is "divine gift," and of the latter, which is "incantation" or "magic spell."
A spiritually normal person would be alarmed and even creeped out if he possessed this kind of influence over others. At the very least, it would be an occasion for the deepest humility, combined with concern over the state of the souls of those under his influence. For one thing, the spiritually normal person knows that this charis is only on loan to him, and that he is not free to use it as he will. He is responsible for those who come under his spiritual influence, and this is a heavy responsibility. It is not to be taken lightly.
Rather, one is only free to use this power if it is aligned with its vertical source. There is something coming through the charismatic, not from him, and as soon as one realizes this, it is an occasion, yes, for gratitude, but also fear and trembling. It is analogous to the power to send men to die for their country, only on the vertical plane. It is the ability to inspire selfless martyrs, but for what purpose? Our satanic enemies are clearly selfless idealists under the influence of charismatic leaders. So what.
Our Unknown Friend asks the questions, "Can one produce artificially intellectual, moral or spiritual inspiration? Can the lungs produce the air which they need for respiration?" No: "the very process of breathing teaches the laws of obedience, poverty, and chastity, i.e. it is a lesson (by analogy) of grace. Conscious breathing in of the reality of grace is Christian Hatha-yoga. Christian Hatha-yoga is the vertical breathing of prayer and benediction -- or, in other words, one opens oneself to grace and receives it."
Unknown Friend goes on to say that the antichrist represents "the ideal of biological and historical evolution without grace." This is a key idea, for what is a progressive? A progressive is someone who believes fervently in progress while fanatically denying its possibility, since progress can only be measured in light of permanent truths and transcendent ideals.
The antichrist "is the ultimate product of this evolution without grace and is not an entity created by God," since divine creation is always a vertical act or descent. Yes, all things ultimately "come from God," in the same sense that all light comes from the sun, but think of all the infernal uses to which man may put the light!
Now, the phenobamenon -- being "derivative" and not from the source -- is ultimately a creator of those who created him. Unknown friend writes that, just as there are spiritual beings who reveal themselves "from above," there are what he calls egregores, which are "engendered artificially from below." Thus, "as powerful as they may be," they "have only an ephemeral existence," the duration of which "depends entirely on galvanising nourishment on the part of their creators."
As such, the really frightening thing about these kinds of amorphous demagogues is that they are given life and nourished by the rabble to whom they nourish and give life, in a spiritually barren cycle. The result is either spiritual asphyxiation or starvation, or probably both. And starved and suffocating men are capable of anything.
Ultimately, the antichrist is the shadow of the totality of mankind, as Jesus was the immanent shadow, so to speak, of the transcendent Divine Principle. The antichrist represents all that man is and can be in the absence of divine grace. It is he who transported Jesus to the highest earthly mountain "and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory" and said to him All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.
The secular extremist or fanatical progressive worships his own creation, and in so doing, gives birth to the antiword. Materially, it results in a leftist Tower of Babel (i.e, the all-powerful state), whereas spiritually it results in a gelatinous tower of leftist babble (i.e., the vacuous but seductive demagogue who will lead the people in the direction of their most base impulses and desires).
To be continued....
"There is a danger here, I think, given that this might be the age when 'Spirit pours out on all flesh,' i.e., the vertical energies actually do become, in a way, more visible, more tangible, even to the oblivious MSM.
"The danger is this: the influx of vertical energies for the most part cannot find suitable spiritual anchoring, do not result in a growth of spiritual insight and wisdom, but rather the vertical energies might be suborned by the horizontal in an entirely unwholesome way.
"An example: hypothetically speaking, let's say... oh, let's say, some political candidate who's running for... oh, let's say, for president of the United States... Let's say this candidate uses the influx of vertical energy in such a way that it does not invest him (or her, let's be fair) with any particular wisdom -- in fact, this candidate mouths and apparently believes in the same old amorphous lefty platitudes. Only... this candidate seems invested with a peculiar type of charisma that has citizens from coast to coast virtually swooning in some orgasmystic ecstasy... no one's higher intellect is sharpened, only their *feelings* are set on fire by this candidate in some peculiar way...
"Well, as was said re: the days when the Spirit pours out on all flesh, one must be very careful not to fall for false messiahs and whatnot... meanwhile, there are those who indeed are spiritually anchoring the vertical energy influx and are doing so invisibly and with a certain amount of travail, as is necessary at this time."
***
First of all, let's get this out of the way at the outset. Are we calling Obama the antichrist?
Yes, or course.
No, wait -- let's not engage in ad obominem. Let's just say an embodiment of the antichristic principle. Let's discuss this in terms of abstract cosmic principles, without getting personal. No need to demonize someone just because he's an instrument of satan. He's just the vehicle, not the driver.
Now, what do we mean by "antichrist?" I would say that, as Christ is Word-made-flesh, the antichristic would analogously represent the "lower principle" made flesh -- the instantiation, as it were, of the Fall.
So first of all, to go along with my analysis, you must believe that man is in some sense a fallen being with a built-in -- or at least inevitable -- flaw. You don't have to be a fanatic about it. You only have to know that "something ain't right" with the earthlings, however you wish to conceptualize it. Being aware of this principle is our greatest inoculation against utopian leftist schemes to perfect mankind, which always result in unanticipated cosmic belowback.
Secondly, you would have to believe that it is possible for the forces responsible for the Fall to be personified -- or, let us say, both focused and dispersed like a beam of darkness through the concavity or convexations of man's heart. As Christ is a blinding light, antichrist would be darkness visible. Thus, to those who live in spiritual darkness, it would appear as a false light -- as, say, a single match is brighter than the sun in an enclosed room, cut off from the sun.
The Serpent, to paraphrase our Unknown Friend in Meditations on the Tarot, symbolizes advanced intelligence ("the most cunning of the beasts") turned wholly toward the horizontal. Thus, it is a perversion of man's intellect, as it represents a self-sufficient naturalism and total (small r) realism that betrays the vertical source of human intelligence. As such, we would expect one aspect of the antichrist to be high intelligence combined with extraordinary vapidity, at least to those with spiritual discernment.
But this cannot merely be the philosophical vapidity of the doctrinaire atheist or scientistic materialist, or it could never gain traction in the human heart, which always hungers for spirit, even if it is the false kind. Rather, it would have to come cloaked in some sort of seductive or hypnotic faux verticality. It would indeed have to be charismatic and charming, bearing in mind the root meaning of former, which is "divine gift," and of the latter, which is "incantation" or "magic spell."
A spiritually normal person would be alarmed and even creeped out if he possessed this kind of influence over others. At the very least, it would be an occasion for the deepest humility, combined with concern over the state of the souls of those under his influence. For one thing, the spiritually normal person knows that this charis is only on loan to him, and that he is not free to use it as he will. He is responsible for those who come under his spiritual influence, and this is a heavy responsibility. It is not to be taken lightly.
Rather, one is only free to use this power if it is aligned with its vertical source. There is something coming through the charismatic, not from him, and as soon as one realizes this, it is an occasion, yes, for gratitude, but also fear and trembling. It is analogous to the power to send men to die for their country, only on the vertical plane. It is the ability to inspire selfless martyrs, but for what purpose? Our satanic enemies are clearly selfless idealists under the influence of charismatic leaders. So what.
Our Unknown Friend asks the questions, "Can one produce artificially intellectual, moral or spiritual inspiration? Can the lungs produce the air which they need for respiration?" No: "the very process of breathing teaches the laws of obedience, poverty, and chastity, i.e. it is a lesson (by analogy) of grace. Conscious breathing in of the reality of grace is Christian Hatha-yoga. Christian Hatha-yoga is the vertical breathing of prayer and benediction -- or, in other words, one opens oneself to grace and receives it."
Unknown Friend goes on to say that the antichrist represents "the ideal of biological and historical evolution without grace." This is a key idea, for what is a progressive? A progressive is someone who believes fervently in progress while fanatically denying its possibility, since progress can only be measured in light of permanent truths and transcendent ideals.
The antichrist "is the ultimate product of this evolution without grace and is not an entity created by God," since divine creation is always a vertical act or descent. Yes, all things ultimately "come from God," in the same sense that all light comes from the sun, but think of all the infernal uses to which man may put the light!
Now, the phenobamenon -- being "derivative" and not from the source -- is ultimately a creator of those who created him. Unknown friend writes that, just as there are spiritual beings who reveal themselves "from above," there are what he calls egregores, which are "engendered artificially from below." Thus, "as powerful as they may be," they "have only an ephemeral existence," the duration of which "depends entirely on galvanising nourishment on the part of their creators."
As such, the really frightening thing about these kinds of amorphous demagogues is that they are given life and nourished by the rabble to whom they nourish and give life, in a spiritually barren cycle. The result is either spiritual asphyxiation or starvation, or probably both. And starved and suffocating men are capable of anything.
Ultimately, the antichrist is the shadow of the totality of mankind, as Jesus was the immanent shadow, so to speak, of the transcendent Divine Principle. The antichrist represents all that man is and can be in the absence of divine grace. It is he who transported Jesus to the highest earthly mountain "and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory" and said to him All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.
The secular extremist or fanatical progressive worships his own creation, and in so doing, gives birth to the antiword. Materially, it results in a leftist Tower of Babel (i.e, the all-powerful state), whereas spiritually it results in a gelatinous tower of leftist babble (i.e., the vacuous but seductive demagogue who will lead the people in the direction of their most base impulses and desires).
To be continued....
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Just Say Yes! to History
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. --Joseph Campbell
So, is history convergent or divergent? In the realm of ideas, a problem is considered convergent if a universal solution to it can be discovered. For example, even if Einstein hadn't gotten there first, it is presumed that someone would have eventually discovered the equivalence of mass and energy. Or if Gene Mauch hadn't come up with the "double switch," some other baseball manager would have. A problem is thought to be divergent when it appears to have no single solution, but when different investigators are led down different paths toward differing conclusions, for example, questions of the most effective way to invest your money, the purpose of life, or the best strategy for arguing with a moonbat.
Now, the vast majority of scholars would undoubtedly consider the problem of history to be a divergent one, with no agreement -- and no possibility of agreement -- as to its ultimate nature: what it is, what is its purpose, where it is headed, etc. Therefore, a priori, history can have no meaning outside the individual historian’s mind. That is, if history doesn't refer to something outside itself, it is ultimately without meaning or purpose, truly the proverbial "tale told by a tenured idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying a nice paycheck.” While there can be limited purposes within history, there is no transcendent meaning to any of these endeavors, any more than there can be transcendent meaning to your individual goals and pursuits. It's all ultimately pointless.
Shortly after the cold war, the neo-Hegelian scholar Francis Fukuyama published his controversial book The End of History and The Last Man. It's been quite a while, but when I read the book, I never took it to mean that, with the end of the Cold War, history had somehow come to a literal end, as if nothing important would happen. Rather, his central point was that history was converging upon liberty, democracy, free markets, and individual rights, because societies that embodied these ideals were best able to fulfill human potential and satisfy mankind's deepest needs. Based upon a kind of natural selection applied to collectivities, countries would increasingly come to resemble one another, because there are more and less objectively effective ways of organizing society and meeting human needs.
I think the biggest knock on Fukuyama is that he underestimated -- to say the least -- the power of religion and culture to shape the human mind. And even more importantly, being a rationalist, he failed to appreciate the unconscious and irrational element in both of these realms. In short, he looked at culture as a basically rational enterprise instead of a deeply irrational (or arational or transrational) one. If even a relatively sane society such as the United States is prone to mass delusions, collective hysteria, and group fantasies, it is scarcely possible for us to imagine what it must be like to be an average citizen of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Berkeley.
And in pointing out that Fukuyama underestimated the power of culture, it's just another way of saying that he overlooked the realm of the vertical, in both its lower and upper aspects. The odd thing about earthlings is that they are attached to their culture, even -- or especially -- if the culture doesn't seem to work. Superficially this makes no sense, but it is exactly analogous to the manner in which a neurotic person is more attached to his neurosis than a "normal" person is to his sanity.
This is for complex reasons related to the manner in which mind parasites function. For a full explanation, I'd have to take a lengthy detour into developmental psychoanalysis, but the main idea is that it is unnecessary for the developing mind to internalize the good, only the bad. The securely attached child is more adventurous, spontaneous, and free, whereas the insecure child becomes much more attached to the very source of his insecurity. You've probably heard the cliche that bereavement is generally much more complicated when the relationship was a negative or ambivalent one, and this is the reason why. In general, pathological relationships are kept in place by a host of unconscious tentacles with hidden agendas, reaching back and forth, holding the couple together with what might be called (-p), or negative passion.
You could say that pathological cultures are essentially exercises in collective (-p). I mean, if you can bypass your sheer horror for the moment, just consider this story from LGF, 'Honor Killing' Epidemic in Britain:
"Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to 'honour' related violence, including murder, every year, according to police chiefs.... And official figures on forced marriages are the tip of the iceberg, says the Association of Chief Police Officers. It warns that the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the 'honour' of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.
"The crisis, with children as young as 11 having been sent abroad to be married, has prompted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to call on British consular staff in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to take more action to identify and help British citizens believed to be the victims of forced marriages in recent years."
The crisis has also also prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury to welcome the imposition of sharia law in Britain. At least the (mostly) homosexual ephebophile Catholic priests only harmed individuals. This loon wants to normalize abuse on a mass scale.
At any rate, Fukuyama was essentially updating the classical liberal ideal of history, or what Coons call darwhiggian evolution. It may be contrasted with the post-modern badeal of historical meaninglessness, which in turn, is actually similar to primitive cosmologies, which either view the cosmos as a cyclical and unprogressive pattern of “eternal return” or as a degenerate process of departure and increasing distance from an idyllic past. Only with the Hebrew approach to history did mankind begin to discern a vector or direction in history, and with it, a sense of history’s purpose. That is, for the first time, history was seen as trying to get somewhere, and was looked upon as somehow interacting with sOmething on a “vertical” plane -- a trans-subjective force which both intervened in history and drew human beings toward it.
Later, Christianity would develop an explicitly logoistic theory of history, embodying the belief in a literal descent of this vertical power into the stream of horizontal time, so as to forge a concrete link between the vertical and horizontal -- between spirit and flesh, time and eternity, O and (•). To say that "God became man" or "Word became flesh" is just another way of saying that the vertical -- the Absolute, timeless ground, outside time and anterior to manifestation -- poured itself into material form and chronological time -- not just in a single human being, but in the whole upward "flow" of humanity.
Only humans can serve as a bridge between the higher and lower planes that are manifest in the outward process of history. Indeed, this is our vocation and purpose: to nurture and grow the seed of eternity within the womb of time. (This is not dissimilar to the Jewish concept ofTikkun -- of participating in the repair and completion of God's creation.)
To contemporary observers, the life of Jesus, or of the Hebrew prophets, was invisible. This is highly instructive. That is, the most important and influential events in human history were completely undetected and overlooked by contemporary sophisticates. Rather, they were noticed only by a handful of provincial rubes who "saw" and "heard," not with their eyes and ears, but in a trans-cerebral, intuitive manner.
What great world-historical events are invisible to the jaded elites of the present? What great vertical energies are entering the world today, undetected by a spiritually oblivious mainstream media, so hypnotized by the spectacle of time and blind to the eternal? The MSM, in thrall to the tyranny of the momentary, doesn't just promote this or that stupid idea. Rather, being that "the medium is the message," its central message is always the same -- that the Aion is broken into a million little disconnected fragments; that the world is deeply bizarre, insane, and perversely anti-human; and yet, at the same time, as trivial and fleeting as the speed of a thumb on the remote control.
The world is always ending, but perpetually being reborn. If that weren't true, mankind would never have found the exit out of its closed circle of material and instinctual existence. I am reminded of a passage from Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:
"The Wake, in its lowest estimate, is a huge time capsule, a complete and permanent record of our age. If our society should go smash tomorrow (which Joyce implies, it may) one could find all of the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium. And here, too, will be found the love that reanimates the debris. Joyce's moraine is not the brickdust but humus.... Through notes that finally become tuneable to our ears, we hear Joyce uttering his resilient, all-enjoying, all animating Yes, the Yes of things yet to come, a Yes from beyond every zone of disillusionment, such as few have had the heart to utter."
For somewhere hovering above the insanity of history is
The whole Truth. Nothing but the Truth. So ham, me God. We'll meet again. Up ahead, 'round the bend. The circle unbroken, by and by. A Divine Child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' Yes. --The Book of Petey
So, is history convergent or divergent? In the realm of ideas, a problem is considered convergent if a universal solution to it can be discovered. For example, even if Einstein hadn't gotten there first, it is presumed that someone would have eventually discovered the equivalence of mass and energy. Or if Gene Mauch hadn't come up with the "double switch," some other baseball manager would have. A problem is thought to be divergent when it appears to have no single solution, but when different investigators are led down different paths toward differing conclusions, for example, questions of the most effective way to invest your money, the purpose of life, or the best strategy for arguing with a moonbat.
Now, the vast majority of scholars would undoubtedly consider the problem of history to be a divergent one, with no agreement -- and no possibility of agreement -- as to its ultimate nature: what it is, what is its purpose, where it is headed, etc. Therefore, a priori, history can have no meaning outside the individual historian’s mind. That is, if history doesn't refer to something outside itself, it is ultimately without meaning or purpose, truly the proverbial "tale told by a tenured idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying a nice paycheck.” While there can be limited purposes within history, there is no transcendent meaning to any of these endeavors, any more than there can be transcendent meaning to your individual goals and pursuits. It's all ultimately pointless.
Shortly after the cold war, the neo-Hegelian scholar Francis Fukuyama published his controversial book The End of History and The Last Man. It's been quite a while, but when I read the book, I never took it to mean that, with the end of the Cold War, history had somehow come to a literal end, as if nothing important would happen. Rather, his central point was that history was converging upon liberty, democracy, free markets, and individual rights, because societies that embodied these ideals were best able to fulfill human potential and satisfy mankind's deepest needs. Based upon a kind of natural selection applied to collectivities, countries would increasingly come to resemble one another, because there are more and less objectively effective ways of organizing society and meeting human needs.
I think the biggest knock on Fukuyama is that he underestimated -- to say the least -- the power of religion and culture to shape the human mind. And even more importantly, being a rationalist, he failed to appreciate the unconscious and irrational element in both of these realms. In short, he looked at culture as a basically rational enterprise instead of a deeply irrational (or arational or transrational) one. If even a relatively sane society such as the United States is prone to mass delusions, collective hysteria, and group fantasies, it is scarcely possible for us to imagine what it must be like to be an average citizen of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Berkeley.
And in pointing out that Fukuyama underestimated the power of culture, it's just another way of saying that he overlooked the realm of the vertical, in both its lower and upper aspects. The odd thing about earthlings is that they are attached to their culture, even -- or especially -- if the culture doesn't seem to work. Superficially this makes no sense, but it is exactly analogous to the manner in which a neurotic person is more attached to his neurosis than a "normal" person is to his sanity.
This is for complex reasons related to the manner in which mind parasites function. For a full explanation, I'd have to take a lengthy detour into developmental psychoanalysis, but the main idea is that it is unnecessary for the developing mind to internalize the good, only the bad. The securely attached child is more adventurous, spontaneous, and free, whereas the insecure child becomes much more attached to the very source of his insecurity. You've probably heard the cliche that bereavement is generally much more complicated when the relationship was a negative or ambivalent one, and this is the reason why. In general, pathological relationships are kept in place by a host of unconscious tentacles with hidden agendas, reaching back and forth, holding the couple together with what might be called (-p), or negative passion.
You could say that pathological cultures are essentially exercises in collective (-p). I mean, if you can bypass your sheer horror for the moment, just consider this story from LGF, 'Honor Killing' Epidemic in Britain:
"Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to 'honour' related violence, including murder, every year, according to police chiefs.... And official figures on forced marriages are the tip of the iceberg, says the Association of Chief Police Officers. It warns that the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the 'honour' of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.
"The crisis, with children as young as 11 having been sent abroad to be married, has prompted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to call on British consular staff in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to take more action to identify and help British citizens believed to be the victims of forced marriages in recent years."
The crisis has also also prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury to welcome the imposition of sharia law in Britain. At least the (mostly) homosexual ephebophile Catholic priests only harmed individuals. This loon wants to normalize abuse on a mass scale.
At any rate, Fukuyama was essentially updating the classical liberal ideal of history, or what Coons call darwhiggian evolution. It may be contrasted with the post-modern badeal of historical meaninglessness, which in turn, is actually similar to primitive cosmologies, which either view the cosmos as a cyclical and unprogressive pattern of “eternal return” or as a degenerate process of departure and increasing distance from an idyllic past. Only with the Hebrew approach to history did mankind begin to discern a vector or direction in history, and with it, a sense of history’s purpose. That is, for the first time, history was seen as trying to get somewhere, and was looked upon as somehow interacting with sOmething on a “vertical” plane -- a trans-subjective force which both intervened in history and drew human beings toward it.
Later, Christianity would develop an explicitly logoistic theory of history, embodying the belief in a literal descent of this vertical power into the stream of horizontal time, so as to forge a concrete link between the vertical and horizontal -- between spirit and flesh, time and eternity, O and (•). To say that "God became man" or "Word became flesh" is just another way of saying that the vertical -- the Absolute, timeless ground, outside time and anterior to manifestation -- poured itself into material form and chronological time -- not just in a single human being, but in the whole upward "flow" of humanity.
Only humans can serve as a bridge between the higher and lower planes that are manifest in the outward process of history. Indeed, this is our vocation and purpose: to nurture and grow the seed of eternity within the womb of time. (This is not dissimilar to the Jewish concept ofTikkun -- of participating in the repair and completion of God's creation.)
To contemporary observers, the life of Jesus, or of the Hebrew prophets, was invisible. This is highly instructive. That is, the most important and influential events in human history were completely undetected and overlooked by contemporary sophisticates. Rather, they were noticed only by a handful of provincial rubes who "saw" and "heard," not with their eyes and ears, but in a trans-cerebral, intuitive manner.
What great world-historical events are invisible to the jaded elites of the present? What great vertical energies are entering the world today, undetected by a spiritually oblivious mainstream media, so hypnotized by the spectacle of time and blind to the eternal? The MSM, in thrall to the tyranny of the momentary, doesn't just promote this or that stupid idea. Rather, being that "the medium is the message," its central message is always the same -- that the Aion is broken into a million little disconnected fragments; that the world is deeply bizarre, insane, and perversely anti-human; and yet, at the same time, as trivial and fleeting as the speed of a thumb on the remote control.
The world is always ending, but perpetually being reborn. If that weren't true, mankind would never have found the exit out of its closed circle of material and instinctual existence. I am reminded of a passage from Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:
"The Wake, in its lowest estimate, is a huge time capsule, a complete and permanent record of our age. If our society should go smash tomorrow (which Joyce implies, it may) one could find all of the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium. And here, too, will be found the love that reanimates the debris. Joyce's moraine is not the brickdust but humus.... Through notes that finally become tuneable to our ears, we hear Joyce uttering his resilient, all-enjoying, all animating Yes, the Yes of things yet to come, a Yes from beyond every zone of disillusionment, such as few have had the heart to utter."
For somewhere hovering above the insanity of history is
The whole Truth. Nothing but the Truth. So ham, me God. We'll meet again. Up ahead, 'round the bend. The circle unbroken, by and by. A Divine Child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' Yes. --The Book of Petey
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Dregs of the Arkive
In keeping with my pledge to rummage through the entire knowa's arkive, I've even found some dusty old incomplete posts. This one from October 10, 2005, was apparently going to be called Christopher Dawson & the Judeo-Christian Innovation of History, before I turned my inattention elsewhere.
I had just finished reading a book called Dynamics of World History, and most of what follows are notes and quotes from the book. (Some of the passages that don't have quotation marks may actually be quotes, or close to them, but I don't have time to double-check.) I was struck by how similar Dawson -- the orthodox Catholic -- is to the orthodox Raccoon view.
Think of these scraps as the raw ingredients that would have made up a post. Or, alternatively, think of them as the bottom of the barrel, like the Beatles Anthology. Or just think of this as an open thread to discuss anything you want.
*****
Detail does not make history any more than random notes make harmony.
Metahistory: “Every historian has his metahistory... the best ones know it.”
“No historian need be taken seriously who claims that his only interest is the past itself... to dismiss a philosophy of history is a philosophy of history, if a paltry and inadvertent one.”
If every historical statement contains a statement about history itself, and if metaphysics is inescapable, the only matter at issue is whose metaphysics.
"Historical evidence is necessary for historical insight but not constitutive of it.... The fact does not tell the story; the story, as it were, tells the fact. It is the latter that gives pattern and meaning; it is the former that lacks meaning of its own."
“History and theology are nothing if not meditations on the nature of Time itself.”
the torrent of human custom
cosmocrats of the dark aeon
never make a god of your religion (or irreligion)
current contempt of religion is just a culturally conditioned product of a particular time & place. it will pass
God makes use of a barbarous semitic tribe -- not determined by merit or logic, but there you are. The odd thing is that the Jews thought they were carrying God down and forward into time, and they achieved it! Tide of history washed all else away, but left the Torah standing.
Cross = turning point of history, where vertical & horizontal meet.
Secular world is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the celestial light breaks in, all the elaborate mechanisms that have been constructed for living in the dark become useless.... no need for canes, braille, seeing eye dogs, etc. The recovery of spiritual vision confers spiritual freedom, because you can move around in hyperspace.
Actor in history is like a captain of a ship in the fog, driven by winds & current, trying to navigate by chart & compass. Where is the captain trying to go?
"... for the world is ruled by powers that it does not know, and the men who appear to be the makers of history are in reality its creatures.”
“Metahistory is concerned with the nature of history, the meaning of history and the cause and significance of historical change. The historian himself is primarily engaged in the study of the past. He does not ask himself why the past is different from the present or what is the meaning of history as a whole."
Escape from circular maze of pagan thought: “Humanity had an absolute beginning and travels to an absolute goal. There can be no return. That which is begun in time ends in eternity. Hence time is not a perpetually revolving image of eternity; it is an irreversible process moving in a definite direction.”
Augustine: time is not simply motion. It is in the soul -- it is spiritual extension. Therefore, cosmos is spirit extended. The past is the soul’s remembrance, the present its attention, the future its anticipation.
I had just finished reading a book called Dynamics of World History, and most of what follows are notes and quotes from the book. (Some of the passages that don't have quotation marks may actually be quotes, or close to them, but I don't have time to double-check.) I was struck by how similar Dawson -- the orthodox Catholic -- is to the orthodox Raccoon view.
Think of these scraps as the raw ingredients that would have made up a post. Or, alternatively, think of them as the bottom of the barrel, like the Beatles Anthology. Or just think of this as an open thread to discuss anything you want.
*****
Detail does not make history any more than random notes make harmony.
Metahistory: “Every historian has his metahistory... the best ones know it.”
“No historian need be taken seriously who claims that his only interest is the past itself... to dismiss a philosophy of history is a philosophy of history, if a paltry and inadvertent one.”
If every historical statement contains a statement about history itself, and if metaphysics is inescapable, the only matter at issue is whose metaphysics.
"Historical evidence is necessary for historical insight but not constitutive of it.... The fact does not tell the story; the story, as it were, tells the fact. It is the latter that gives pattern and meaning; it is the former that lacks meaning of its own."
“History and theology are nothing if not meditations on the nature of Time itself.”
the torrent of human custom
cosmocrats of the dark aeon
never make a god of your religion (or irreligion)
current contempt of religion is just a culturally conditioned product of a particular time & place. it will pass
God makes use of a barbarous semitic tribe -- not determined by merit or logic, but there you are. The odd thing is that the Jews thought they were carrying God down and forward into time, and they achieved it! Tide of history washed all else away, but left the Torah standing.
Cross = turning point of history, where vertical & horizontal meet.
Secular world is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the celestial light breaks in, all the elaborate mechanisms that have been constructed for living in the dark become useless.... no need for canes, braille, seeing eye dogs, etc. The recovery of spiritual vision confers spiritual freedom, because you can move around in hyperspace.
Actor in history is like a captain of a ship in the fog, driven by winds & current, trying to navigate by chart & compass. Where is the captain trying to go?
"... for the world is ruled by powers that it does not know, and the men who appear to be the makers of history are in reality its creatures.”
“Metahistory is concerned with the nature of history, the meaning of history and the cause and significance of historical change. The historian himself is primarily engaged in the study of the past. He does not ask himself why the past is different from the present or what is the meaning of history as a whole."
Escape from circular maze of pagan thought: “Humanity had an absolute beginning and travels to an absolute goal. There can be no return. That which is begun in time ends in eternity. Hence time is not a perpetually revolving image of eternity; it is an irreversible process moving in a definite direction.”
Augustine: time is not simply motion. It is in the soul -- it is spiritual extension. Therefore, cosmos is spirit extended. The past is the soul’s remembrance, the present its attention, the future its anticipation.
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