Why are we blogging on a Saturday? In fact, why are we blogging at all, when Bob said he was going to cut back? As to the first question, Bob just woke up refreshed and alert at 6:30, and here we are with nothing else to do. It's the only time during the day that the house is silent and peaceful, so why waste the silence and peace?
As to the second -- it's a little more complicated - but when that layer of rock forms between O and (n), we've decided that, instead of throwing up our hands, Bob's going to use me to bash his head against the rock with all the more force. Rather than backing off, we're going to ramp up the gymgnostics and verticalisthenics. Perhaps just as in weightlifting, the resistance is what creates the strength.
I am reminded of Sri Aurobindo, who often wrote of his struggles to "break on through" despite obstacles -- obstacles which seemed to throw up more resistance the more he progressed. Satprem (author of the best book on Aurobindo, The Adventure of Consciousness) writes that "if one draws down too strong a light, all the darkness below groans, violated." This aspect of the the mind "can be quite formidable, like an army of ants against an elephant." As Aurobindo's collaborator (known as "the Mother") put it, "the question in this race towards transformation is to know which of the two will arrive first, the person who wants to transform the body in the image of divine Truth, or the body's old habit of disintegrating." It's Evolution vs. Entropy, in a fight to the finish. Satprem elaborates:
"The more one descends the scale of consciousness, the thicker the falsehood and the more things die, of course, because falsehood is in essence rot.... Old age and illness are among its most evident falsehoods -- how could what is true become old, ugly, worn out, or ill? Truth is radiant, it is beautiful, luminous, and eternal. That is obvious. Truth is invincible. Death and old age can only touch us through our lack of Truth." This dark counter-force cannot be undone except by way of "a pressure from above, which responds to a call from below and breaks the seal, as the sun breaks the skin of the seed."
Sri Aurobindo spoke of the work of "dredging, dredging, dredging the mire of the subconscious." Satprem: "There is still too much jungle down below. The world is still full of jungles" over which "our mental colonization is a very thin crust." "In short, one has to face everything -- and everything resists.... [W]e cannot solve a problem, on any plane, without confronting all the opposites of our Goal.... And one easily understands how no transformation is possible as long as the forces [i.e., mind parasites] are simply muzzled, and remain prowling around in dark corners awaiting their hour. Since nothing can be subtracted from the universe, they must be converted." Thus, as Aurobindo wrote to a disciple,
"There is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make an appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare of Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks." This touches on the folly of leftism, "the colossal vanity of those who pretend to cure the world by external means and new institutions; no sooner is evil healed in one place than it revives instantly elsewhere, in some other place, in some other form. Evil is not outside, it is within and below, and as long as that particular Disease has not been cured, the world cannot be cured" (Satprem). The whole world resists: "It is not we who wage war, it is everything that wars against us!" (Aurobindo).
It is not difficult to trancelight any of this into Christian terms. Paul: For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God and the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked one. Or as Jesus himself said, No one after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. No, we plunge ahead, bashing our hearts against the headstone. (I'm sure that Nomo can find many more good examples.)
Hmm, that was only meant to be a brief prelude, but I'm afraid it may have turned into a quaalude that put you all to sleep. We're still flipping through these mysterious journals that Bob has laying around, trying to decipher their childish scrawl and see if we can't mind a few gnuggets from them. Here's one I like. It says something to the effect that Schuon is like stately and dignified classical music, whereas new-age/integral pop is more like banal and trivial pap music. Then it says -- or I think it says -- "Coony Tunes = Modern Jazz."
I think I understand what he's driving at here. In the case of classical music, it's almost like revelation, in the sense that there is a fixed canon of immortal works that few people believe will ever be surpassed, e.g., Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al. Pop music is the opposite, in that it is almost entirely ephemeral and without lasting value.
You could also say that classical music represents "old Europe," or even the old world in general, whereas pop music embodies the most crass and superficial elements of consumer driven fashion. But what about jazz? First of all, jazz is intrinsically American. But what is it? Above all, it is the art of spontaneous composition, but not in an undisciplined or arbitrary way. Rather, it involves instantaneous creativity utilizing a fixed chordal structure; or, to put it another way, inspired horizontal improvisation that is "spun out" through the vertical chordal changes.
As Bob tried to explain in the book, there is a reason why humans are so attracted to music, the reason being that there is something about music that reveals the very structure of the cosmos in both its "exterior" and "interior" aspects.
For example, a scientist might look at creation as an elaborate solo over the "chords of creation," that is, the twenty mathematical parameters that govern the character and development of the universe. These parameters do not rigidly determine events, any more than the chords of I Got Rhythm determine the musician's solo. Rather, the solo is infinitely free to vary within the constraints of the chords. In fact, in the absence of the chordal constraints, there can be no coherent solo.
A Raccoon looks at revelation in the same way, bearing in mind that there are three more or less co-equal branches of revelation, 1) the cosmos, 2) scripture, and 3) the uncreated intellect that represents the subjective "extension" of the Divine into the human realm. So Raccoons basically play live spirit-jazz out of these three songbooks in order to produce our loose canon of non-standards. Call it spiritual improve-isation.
good-Day!
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Friday, March 28, 2008
The Journal of a Laughtime with Bob's Unconscious
Okay, I don't think that went over too well, and I think I know why. Bob just posted a bunch of unconscious fragments, when he should have allowed me -- Bob's unconscious -- to elaborate on them. After all, I am the one who produces these quirky gems to begin with, so I should be allowed to flesh them out to a glossy sheen. Which is basically how I operate down here in my analogical world, blending this and that metaphor in various inappropriate ways.
So today, Bob has set me free to look over the sacred journals, and to spontaneously "free associate" as I see fit, as soon as I come across a passage that engages my attention. This may take us far afield, but so what? I don't live in the same world as you timebound clockjockeys. I'm free, baby. The horizontal Man can't touch me. I'm always just over the subjective horizon, relaxing in Upper Tonga.
Here's a good one. The left in particular, because they deny the vertical, end up projecting it into the horizontal, which then creates a sort of dividing line between the way things are and the way they would like them to be.
Actually, I don't think it's just leftists who do this, except that in their case they can't help doing it. It must be a universal human tendency that becomes their default state in the absence of any vertical orientation. It's why the unreflective "reality based community" always lives in a fantasy they don't even know they're creating.
If you project the vertical into the horizontal, it results in either pathological hope or a dysfunctional, distorting kind of nostalgia. For example, back when Bob was a Boy of the Left, he idealized the 1960s, as if that were the apex of human liberation and fulfillment instead of a manic and frivolous escape from history, maturity, and hygiene. Some people might idealize "the Clinton years," or "the Kennedy years," and the media encourage this kind of reification of time.
Obviously, some conservatives and probably most Republicans are prone to the same thing, idealizing "the Reagan years," or imagining that some ideal candidate could come along and fundamentally alter our reality. But it has never happened and it never will happen. A true conservative realizes this, which is one of the reasons why we do not get too excited about day-to-day politics, since history is full of irony and surprises and forces we do not understand. It's like the weather.
One of the reasons why the global warming hysteria is such a scam is that they rely upon models that select a finite number of variables out of an infinite number. But if you overlook a critical variable, the whole model just generates BS, which is increasingly obvious with "global warming" models. It reminds me of the old joke about the Soviet Union. When their models didn't pan out, they promised to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
With regard to history, it cannot be reduced to anything less complex than itself. It cannot be comprehended from "within," but this is not to say that it cannot be comprehended. But the only way to do so is to escape "upward" and understand the metaphysical principles of which it is an instantiation. History is derivative -- an unpleasant "side effect" -- of vertical principles that play out in unpredictable ways in the herebelow. In fact, this is how we balance free will and predestination, as the large contours are fixed, even while we are given more than enough rope to hang ourselves down here.
Along these lines, there is an article today at American Thinker called Whites Can't Make Blacks Happy:
"One of the creepy things about our 'need to have a conversation about race' is the assumption that whites can somehow make blacks feel better, or be happier, or be more self-accepting. Nobody has the power to do that, except what individuals do for themselves, one person at a time."
Exactly. It is the height of immaturity to think otherwise, so to encourage this mindset is to encourage emotional immaturity -- which, of course, is the left's specialty, since emotional immaturity creates dependence, and dependence is the source of their power.
This is what I call Loser Power, and you should never underestimate its potential. It is somewhat analogous to gravity, in that it's just the tendency of fallen bodies to seek a state of repose by following the pathology of least resistance. And yet, just as a clever person can harness gravity and turn it into a productive force, e.g., a dam or waterwheel, a clever demagogue can convert a collective sense of narcissistic entitlement into real power. Think of how much narcissism and immaturity it takes to keep the leftist wheel of misfortune spinning! But they have no worries, because there's always an endless supply of inflated self-regard, Man being what he is, which is either less than or all too much of one.
We'll never run out of gravity, since it's not fundamentally a force, but a property of spacetime curvature. Likewise, narcissism is not a force, but a result of the ego's similar tendency to curve and bend psychic space around itself in a tight and compacted spiral. It is the opposite of spiritual "radiance," which must be marshaled to counter this tendency.
The bottom lyin' for the left is the belief that the ego can make itself happy on its own level. Thus, the left constantly promises things it can never deliver -- which is, ironically, what they accuse religion of doing. It is vital for the left that you not know the source of your own existential misery, and that you fall for their empty promise that they can deliver you from your own hell. As Lewis explains,
"Most people don't come close to lasting happiness in their own lives. So the popular Leftist charge of America's 'institutional racism' comes down to saying that 'The Great White Conspiracy is responsible for rescuing you from your bad feelings.' That is just cockeyed."
The real problem is that "Far too many black people don't feel good about themselves, and are constantly looking for answers from somebody else. That quest for the impossible has been turned into an accusation against the invisible but all-powerful white racist establishment. Michelle and Barack Obama were indoctrinated with those toxic beliefs at Princeton and Harvard, so that they are now making more than a million bucks a year, living in a mansion in Chicago while still feeling sorry for themselves."
This is what I mean about the endless supply of narcissism and entitlement. Whatever bounty the Obamas receive, it will never be enough to appease their in-built envy. Their motto should be "We made it, and so can't you!"
Speaking of converting envy, hatred, narcissism and paranoia into cash and other valuable prizes, just look at their spiritual dementor, the Reverend Wright. American Thinker reports that this poor, persecuted black man is about to move into his new $1.6 million, 10,340-square-foot shack in suburban Chicago. Maybe when he said Goddamn America, he meant it in that ironic, streetwise way, as in Damn, America be baaaaaad!
It seems that the Reverend walks around with the opposite of a pimp roll, which is a wad of singles with a hundred dollar bill around it to make the pimp look more affluent than he is. In the case of the Reverend, he has a roll of hundreds concealed by a tattered old one dollar bill on the outside.
Here's what the Constitution guarantees: 1) Life, since without it nothing is possible, while with it, all things are possible; 2) Liberty, since human life in the absence of liberty is not worth living, freedom being intrinsic to the human state -- even if most humans have to be driven toward it with whips, whether in Iraq or Berkeley; and 3) The pursuit of happiness, which is quite the opposite of a) the pursuit of pleasure, which is mere hedonism, and b) entitlement to happiness, much less pleasure. No, the government is only there to ensure that you yourself may pursue this elusive spiritual state called "happiness." To put it another way, if the government can confer it upon you, it's not happiness, but something far less -- something beneath the properly human state.
But as Lewis points out, the professional politician won't get far by promising that he can't make you happy -- which is why it is so difficult to translate the conservative intellectual movement into a political one, i.e., to turn Republicans into conservatives: "For politicians, voter dissatisfaction is the fuel of personal careers. You can't get anywhere by promising all the answers to people who don't need you. So the first order of business is to find dissatisfied voters, and if they're not there, stir up some dissatisfaction. That's why Obama needed the Rev -- to get him in good with a proletariat, any proletariat, in this case a black one."
This is also how you can discern a false religion from a true one, as the false one will exploit various things that are intrinsic to the human condition, and offer quick solutions to resolving or overcoming them. In contrast, Petey and the Transdimensional Order of the Friendly Sons and Daughters of the Cosmic Raccoon promise only a struggle and an adventure, but the struggle is worth it, and it will be the adventure of a lifetime, because it will transpose your little melody of a life into a higher key, so that you might even hear the song supreme and the cosmic suite.
At the end of Lewis' piece, he offers what might be a "prayer for the soul of the leftist." Just admit that there is a power greater than your narrow sense of entitlement, and repeat,
"1. There is no excuse for lack of effort.
2. Although I may be unhappy with my circumstances, and although racism and sexism and other 'isms' exist, I know that things are better now than ever, and the future is even brighter.
3. While I may be unhappy with my circumstances, I have the power to change and improve my life. I refuse to be a victim.
4. Others may have been blessed with more money, better connections, a better home environment, and even better looks, but I can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and education."
So today, Bob has set me free to look over the sacred journals, and to spontaneously "free associate" as I see fit, as soon as I come across a passage that engages my attention. This may take us far afield, but so what? I don't live in the same world as you timebound clockjockeys. I'm free, baby. The horizontal Man can't touch me. I'm always just over the subjective horizon, relaxing in Upper Tonga.
Here's a good one. The left in particular, because they deny the vertical, end up projecting it into the horizontal, which then creates a sort of dividing line between the way things are and the way they would like them to be.
Actually, I don't think it's just leftists who do this, except that in their case they can't help doing it. It must be a universal human tendency that becomes their default state in the absence of any vertical orientation. It's why the unreflective "reality based community" always lives in a fantasy they don't even know they're creating.
If you project the vertical into the horizontal, it results in either pathological hope or a dysfunctional, distorting kind of nostalgia. For example, back when Bob was a Boy of the Left, he idealized the 1960s, as if that were the apex of human liberation and fulfillment instead of a manic and frivolous escape from history, maturity, and hygiene. Some people might idealize "the Clinton years," or "the Kennedy years," and the media encourage this kind of reification of time.
Obviously, some conservatives and probably most Republicans are prone to the same thing, idealizing "the Reagan years," or imagining that some ideal candidate could come along and fundamentally alter our reality. But it has never happened and it never will happen. A true conservative realizes this, which is one of the reasons why we do not get too excited about day-to-day politics, since history is full of irony and surprises and forces we do not understand. It's like the weather.
One of the reasons why the global warming hysteria is such a scam is that they rely upon models that select a finite number of variables out of an infinite number. But if you overlook a critical variable, the whole model just generates BS, which is increasingly obvious with "global warming" models. It reminds me of the old joke about the Soviet Union. When their models didn't pan out, they promised to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
With regard to history, it cannot be reduced to anything less complex than itself. It cannot be comprehended from "within," but this is not to say that it cannot be comprehended. But the only way to do so is to escape "upward" and understand the metaphysical principles of which it is an instantiation. History is derivative -- an unpleasant "side effect" -- of vertical principles that play out in unpredictable ways in the herebelow. In fact, this is how we balance free will and predestination, as the large contours are fixed, even while we are given more than enough rope to hang ourselves down here.
Along these lines, there is an article today at American Thinker called Whites Can't Make Blacks Happy:
"One of the creepy things about our 'need to have a conversation about race' is the assumption that whites can somehow make blacks feel better, or be happier, or be more self-accepting. Nobody has the power to do that, except what individuals do for themselves, one person at a time."
Exactly. It is the height of immaturity to think otherwise, so to encourage this mindset is to encourage emotional immaturity -- which, of course, is the left's specialty, since emotional immaturity creates dependence, and dependence is the source of their power.
This is what I call Loser Power, and you should never underestimate its potential. It is somewhat analogous to gravity, in that it's just the tendency of fallen bodies to seek a state of repose by following the pathology of least resistance. And yet, just as a clever person can harness gravity and turn it into a productive force, e.g., a dam or waterwheel, a clever demagogue can convert a collective sense of narcissistic entitlement into real power. Think of how much narcissism and immaturity it takes to keep the leftist wheel of misfortune spinning! But they have no worries, because there's always an endless supply of inflated self-regard, Man being what he is, which is either less than or all too much of one.
We'll never run out of gravity, since it's not fundamentally a force, but a property of spacetime curvature. Likewise, narcissism is not a force, but a result of the ego's similar tendency to curve and bend psychic space around itself in a tight and compacted spiral. It is the opposite of spiritual "radiance," which must be marshaled to counter this tendency.
The bottom lyin' for the left is the belief that the ego can make itself happy on its own level. Thus, the left constantly promises things it can never deliver -- which is, ironically, what they accuse religion of doing. It is vital for the left that you not know the source of your own existential misery, and that you fall for their empty promise that they can deliver you from your own hell. As Lewis explains,
"Most people don't come close to lasting happiness in their own lives. So the popular Leftist charge of America's 'institutional racism' comes down to saying that 'The Great White Conspiracy is responsible for rescuing you from your bad feelings.' That is just cockeyed."
The real problem is that "Far too many black people don't feel good about themselves, and are constantly looking for answers from somebody else. That quest for the impossible has been turned into an accusation against the invisible but all-powerful white racist establishment. Michelle and Barack Obama were indoctrinated with those toxic beliefs at Princeton and Harvard, so that they are now making more than a million bucks a year, living in a mansion in Chicago while still feeling sorry for themselves."
This is what I mean about the endless supply of narcissism and entitlement. Whatever bounty the Obamas receive, it will never be enough to appease their in-built envy. Their motto should be "We made it, and so can't you!"
Speaking of converting envy, hatred, narcissism and paranoia into cash and other valuable prizes, just look at their spiritual dementor, the Reverend Wright. American Thinker reports that this poor, persecuted black man is about to move into his new $1.6 million, 10,340-square-foot shack in suburban Chicago. Maybe when he said Goddamn America, he meant it in that ironic, streetwise way, as in Damn, America be baaaaaad!
It seems that the Reverend walks around with the opposite of a pimp roll, which is a wad of singles with a hundred dollar bill around it to make the pimp look more affluent than he is. In the case of the Reverend, he has a roll of hundreds concealed by a tattered old one dollar bill on the outside.
Here's what the Constitution guarantees: 1) Life, since without it nothing is possible, while with it, all things are possible; 2) Liberty, since human life in the absence of liberty is not worth living, freedom being intrinsic to the human state -- even if most humans have to be driven toward it with whips, whether in Iraq or Berkeley; and 3) The pursuit of happiness, which is quite the opposite of a) the pursuit of pleasure, which is mere hedonism, and b) entitlement to happiness, much less pleasure. No, the government is only there to ensure that you yourself may pursue this elusive spiritual state called "happiness." To put it another way, if the government can confer it upon you, it's not happiness, but something far less -- something beneath the properly human state.
But as Lewis points out, the professional politician won't get far by promising that he can't make you happy -- which is why it is so difficult to translate the conservative intellectual movement into a political one, i.e., to turn Republicans into conservatives: "For politicians, voter dissatisfaction is the fuel of personal careers. You can't get anywhere by promising all the answers to people who don't need you. So the first order of business is to find dissatisfied voters, and if they're not there, stir up some dissatisfaction. That's why Obama needed the Rev -- to get him in good with a proletariat, any proletariat, in this case a black one."
This is also how you can discern a false religion from a true one, as the false one will exploit various things that are intrinsic to the human condition, and offer quick solutions to resolving or overcoming them. In contrast, Petey and the Transdimensional Order of the Friendly Sons and Daughters of the Cosmic Raccoon promise only a struggle and an adventure, but the struggle is worth it, and it will be the adventure of a lifetime, because it will transpose your little melody of a life into a higher key, so that you might even hear the song supreme and the cosmic suite.
At the end of Lewis' piece, he offers what might be a "prayer for the soul of the leftist." Just admit that there is a power greater than your narrow sense of entitlement, and repeat,
"1. There is no excuse for lack of effort.
2. Although I may be unhappy with my circumstances, and although racism and sexism and other 'isms' exist, I know that things are better now than ever, and the future is even brighter.
3. While I may be unhappy with my circumstances, I have the power to change and improve my life. I refuse to be a victim.
4. Others may have been blessed with more money, better connections, a better home environment, and even better looks, but I can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and education."
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Spring Cleaning: Mythellaneous Gods & Ends
As I mentioned the other day, I'd like to clear out all of these notepads and post-its I have laying around, and reduce them to some kind of coherent disorder, so I can finally toss them. I must have at least half a dozen notepads here in my lap, filled with murky mudditations and cognitively arrested developments that never even grew to juvenilia.
Let's start with this big yellow one. Hmm. Some of this looks pretty self-indulgent. When I look back over these things, sometimes I'm not even sure what I meant. Oh well. Maybe you can figure them out, or at least find a useful nugget or two on which to coontemplate. In any event, I apologize in advance for some of these nascent pre-thoughts that perhaps should have been allowed to properly grow up and become fully half-baked before being prematurely sent out to make their way in the world.
Is a merely rational theology possible? Need for a-logic in theology, or patterned transrationality. Pre-scientific mythologies are incoherent non-absurdities. Mental illness is an incoherent absurdity. Reason reduces world to coherent absurdity. Only metaphysics leads to coherent non-absurdity.
How do we mediate between a theological literalism that no longer speaks to modern minds and a liberalism that drains it of any emotional resonance with the deeper strata of consciousness? In order to understand the vertical, the realm of imagination must be engaged & expanded, e.g., Genesis: the less saturated, the more likely imagination can fill the innerstices. "Form walks with meaning in the ascent to infinity." God is found in the "deep within" of things. If not there, where?
To convey the eternal, the transcendent, the infinite, the absolute, within the things of time, one cannot do so without symbolism, paradox, myth, wordplay, oxymoron (virgin-mother) & other deivoices. Must have both spiritual experiences and a special way to communicate and talk about them. In so doing, the one pole strengthens the other. Trying to speak in such a way as to attract and engage the attention of the supramental consciousness. Linguistic theological attractors.
Mystical theology revolves around a central point vs. linear description of science. The verbal hammer hits the celestial stone, sending luminous sparks down below. The stone is one, the sparks infinite.
Why is there a literal hunger for music? To whom or what is it speaking? What's the difference between listening to the Eroica Symphony and reading a good biography of Napoleon? Schuon: "Music is the art of bringing terrestrial shadows back to celestial vibrations and divine archetypes."
Aquinas: time measures before and after, eternity is the simultaneous presence of the whole: "no beforeafter, nobodaddy, no mamafestation, nothing but neti..." Wholly present vs. everlasting. Christ annuls time, full-fills history: first and last, Alphomega, it is accomplished.
Mysticism is no different from ordinary life, just a different angle. Not an attempt to obliterate the ego by entering a murky cloud of unconsciousness, but infusing one's being with it -- not to merge with the ocean but to partake of it. Not merging with the infinite, nor clinging to fixed thoughts about it, but living in the flow between them. Epistemology vs. Mystepistemology: what did you not know and when did you unKnow it?
Your Being is God's Doing.
Something must be understood a priori of the nature of God before we can make any statements about him. It is tautology unless we have uncreated, implicit, pre-conceptual knowledge of the category of God, into which certain experiences will flow, or be "attracted." If we don't agree on our ontology, epistemology will just confuse. God is an innate readiness to experience O. Or vice versa. To "invite" the religious object.
When you ask what something "is," is it atoms? Or is it the palpably physical? Or the thoughts you have that are able to ponder the physical or atomic, the macro or the micro? Which is more "real?" The supraconscious does not "ex-ist," or "stand out." In-sist, maybe. We can notice its vapor trails on the inscape of consciousness. Higher realities don't "stand out" except to those who "stand in" them. How do you go about standing in them? Same way you stand in the unconscious. Relux & call it a deity.
Rt. brain develops ahead of left brain & is where our unitary background of primary being resides. Just so, God is not what stands out, but that from which other things stand out. God is not in space. Space is in God. Creation is holographic and fractal: therefore, whole of God is in the consecrated bread. It has no physical existence, and yet, can only ex-ist in the physical. So the question is not whether God exists -- it is whether or not God can be made present.
Creation and storage of eternal memories. How is this done? How do temporal events move into the zone of timelessness? Garden of Eden: from the zone of timelessness to time, symmetry to asymmetry. We live in time but we remember the timeless. Adam blew it. He's our blewprint.
Revelation is the first draft of metahistory, journalism makes a daft farce of history. Merger of vertical and horizontal in prehistory. They only became completely separate with modernity. Still merged in Islamic world.
Those half-humans who live solely in the scientistic horizontal: factsimians.
Idea for title of Victoria's Secret catalogue: "All Thongs Considered."
Viagra: a cure for what fails you.
Trying to make a post out of all this BS: "composting."
Modern philosophy: "A systematic abuse of language invented for that purpose." (Not sure who came up with that one.)
Dream a little dream: you are the dream programmer, the medium through which the programmer works, and the material with which he works. The world is in your dreams, but you are the world that is in your dreams -- i.e., you created the dreamworld you inhabit, as well as the you that you experience in the dream. How is this any different from waking life? Like a Klein Bottle: there is an "inside" and an "outside," but only one surface. Could the dream be the cosmos outside in, and "reality" the dreamer inside out? How could it not be.
Well, one journal down, six or seven more to go.....
Let's start with this big yellow one. Hmm. Some of this looks pretty self-indulgent. When I look back over these things, sometimes I'm not even sure what I meant. Oh well. Maybe you can figure them out, or at least find a useful nugget or two on which to coontemplate. In any event, I apologize in advance for some of these nascent pre-thoughts that perhaps should have been allowed to properly grow up and become fully half-baked before being prematurely sent out to make their way in the world.
Is a merely rational theology possible? Need for a-logic in theology, or patterned transrationality. Pre-scientific mythologies are incoherent non-absurdities. Mental illness is an incoherent absurdity. Reason reduces world to coherent absurdity. Only metaphysics leads to coherent non-absurdity.
How do we mediate between a theological literalism that no longer speaks to modern minds and a liberalism that drains it of any emotional resonance with the deeper strata of consciousness? In order to understand the vertical, the realm of imagination must be engaged & expanded, e.g., Genesis: the less saturated, the more likely imagination can fill the innerstices. "Form walks with meaning in the ascent to infinity." God is found in the "deep within" of things. If not there, where?
To convey the eternal, the transcendent, the infinite, the absolute, within the things of time, one cannot do so without symbolism, paradox, myth, wordplay, oxymoron (virgin-mother) & other deivoices. Must have both spiritual experiences and a special way to communicate and talk about them. In so doing, the one pole strengthens the other. Trying to speak in such a way as to attract and engage the attention of the supramental consciousness. Linguistic theological attractors.
Mystical theology revolves around a central point vs. linear description of science. The verbal hammer hits the celestial stone, sending luminous sparks down below. The stone is one, the sparks infinite.
Why is there a literal hunger for music? To whom or what is it speaking? What's the difference between listening to the Eroica Symphony and reading a good biography of Napoleon? Schuon: "Music is the art of bringing terrestrial shadows back to celestial vibrations and divine archetypes."
Aquinas: time measures before and after, eternity is the simultaneous presence of the whole: "no beforeafter, nobodaddy, no mamafestation, nothing but neti..." Wholly present vs. everlasting. Christ annuls time, full-fills history: first and last, Alphomega, it is accomplished.
Mysticism is no different from ordinary life, just a different angle. Not an attempt to obliterate the ego by entering a murky cloud of unconsciousness, but infusing one's being with it -- not to merge with the ocean but to partake of it. Not merging with the infinite, nor clinging to fixed thoughts about it, but living in the flow between them. Epistemology vs. Mystepistemology: what did you not know and when did you unKnow it?
Your Being is God's Doing.
Something must be understood a priori of the nature of God before we can make any statements about him. It is tautology unless we have uncreated, implicit, pre-conceptual knowledge of the category of God, into which certain experiences will flow, or be "attracted." If we don't agree on our ontology, epistemology will just confuse. God is an innate readiness to experience O. Or vice versa. To "invite" the religious object.
When you ask what something "is," is it atoms? Or is it the palpably physical? Or the thoughts you have that are able to ponder the physical or atomic, the macro or the micro? Which is more "real?" The supraconscious does not "ex-ist," or "stand out." In-sist, maybe. We can notice its vapor trails on the inscape of consciousness. Higher realities don't "stand out" except to those who "stand in" them. How do you go about standing in them? Same way you stand in the unconscious. Relux & call it a deity.
Rt. brain develops ahead of left brain & is where our unitary background of primary being resides. Just so, God is not what stands out, but that from which other things stand out. God is not in space. Space is in God. Creation is holographic and fractal: therefore, whole of God is in the consecrated bread. It has no physical existence, and yet, can only ex-ist in the physical. So the question is not whether God exists -- it is whether or not God can be made present.
Creation and storage of eternal memories. How is this done? How do temporal events move into the zone of timelessness? Garden of Eden: from the zone of timelessness to time, symmetry to asymmetry. We live in time but we remember the timeless. Adam blew it. He's our blewprint.
Revelation is the first draft of metahistory, journalism makes a daft farce of history. Merger of vertical and horizontal in prehistory. They only became completely separate with modernity. Still merged in Islamic world.
Those half-humans who live solely in the scientistic horizontal: factsimians.
Idea for title of Victoria's Secret catalogue: "All Thongs Considered."
Viagra: a cure for what fails you.
Trying to make a post out of all this BS: "composting."
Modern philosophy: "A systematic abuse of language invented for that purpose." (Not sure who came up with that one.)
Dream a little dream: you are the dream programmer, the medium through which the programmer works, and the material with which he works. The world is in your dreams, but you are the world that is in your dreams -- i.e., you created the dreamworld you inhabit, as well as the you that you experience in the dream. How is this any different from waking life? Like a Klein Bottle: there is an "inside" and an "outside," but only one surface. Could the dream be the cosmos outside in, and "reality" the dreamer inside out? How could it not be.
Well, one journal down, six or seven more to go.....
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
How the Word is Flushed When the Weird Becomes Flesh
In The Religion of Eternal Racism and Eternal Sexism, Bruce Walker addresses a sort of paradox, that is, the left's embodiment of "eternal" principles, when the whole point of the left is that -- in the turgid but accurate phrase of Eric Voegelin - it "immamentizes the eschaton," meaning, in plain Raccoon lingo, that it collapses the vertical into the horizontal, which dispenses with the "permanent things" of the transcendent realm altogether. As a result, all that is left for the bereft left is a horizontal, temporal, and material struggle "below," which necessarily pits one group against another, based solely upon the lust for power. Any cynical "humanist" will tell you that this is simply the way of the world.
This is because, in the absence of absolute principles to guide them, humans are reduced to something slightly below the animal kingdom, in that we have their form but not their nobility, restraint, and common sense. Rather, we are like "animals gone wild," somehow liberated from our genetic program to undo nature's delicate balance and wreak havoc on the planet. Any good "environmentalist" will tell you this.
My point is that the left can have no "eternal principles" on pain of immediate and final self-refutation. Therefore, it must obscure its absence of principles with constant tactical maneuvers that change from day to day, week to week, and year to year. Obviously, if you deny what Schuon calls the higher "principial" realm -- which contains the absolute and eternal metaphysical principles of which this lower world is an instantiation -- you can only live in a kind of "absolute relativity," which, if you give it a moment's thought, is intrinsically absurd. Frankly, it is metaphysically impossible, as relativity would then be absolute, thus negating itself. Obviously, cultural and moral relativism are intrinsically absurd and self-negating as well.
Walker highlights this absurdity of the left, in that it hews to faux-eternal principles which can never change irrespective of what actually happens in what they ironically call "reality," being that reality for them is reduced to the flatland, material world. For example, Walker asks, "How many 'civil rights' leaders talk as if racism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? How many feminist leaders talk as if sexism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? The mere passage of years, the mere enactment of statutes or adoption of polices, the decades long public relations campaign against bigotry -- none of this can be allowed to make a difference" (emphasis mine).
But why does the left embrace a kind of bitter and reactionary anti-theology, in which they hold to such a negative view of the world despite what actually occurs here? As Walker writes, "the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex."
But here again we can see that the left is not guided by true principles, for example, the truly eternal principle that "all men are created equal." Rather, for the left, "it is crucial that the sin is not racism or sexism, but specifically American (or, perhaps, Western) racism and sexism." If the crimes aren't committed by white Westerners, feminists aren't interested. They will yawn "when told about honor murders, female circumcision and the imprisonment of rape victims," so long as non-Christian people of color are responsible. "The catechism of the Left is that America is evil," not that rape or honor killing are evil.
So the true motive that animates the left is not a "positive" principle such as equality, much less liberty, but an anti-principle. And this is why it takes such diverse forms, as the leftist must always fool you (and, more importantly, himself) into believing that he is defending eternal principles, principles in which he doesn't actually believe. For example, the left universally believes that it is proper for the government to discriminate on the basis of race, "gender" and "sexual orientation", and that failure to do so should be illegal. Not surprisingly, the party of trial lawyers loves these kinds of laws, because trial lawyers are the group that most benefits from this crass power grab in the guise of a principle.
The left once unanimously maintained that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But the fact that they so readily abandoned this principle shows how they are always rooted in tactics, not principles. Likewise, up until the late '60s and early '70s, the left was a vocal supporter of Israel, whereas now all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world emanates from the left (including, of course, the Obama campaign (cf here).
America's founders were (among other things) political mystics, in that they did not "deduce" the spiritual principles upon which the country was founded, but saw into the realm where they eternally abide. The intellect "sees" these principles with absolute certainty, "light to light," so to speak. As Schuon explains, "Metaphysical truths are by no means accepted because they are merely logically clear, but because they are ontologically clear, and their logical clarity is only a trace of this imprinted on the mind." Here again, this kind of higher truth is "not held to be true -- by those who understand it -- because it is expressed in a logical manner, but it can be expressed in a logical manner because it is true, without -- obviously -- its truth ever being compromised by the possible shortcomings of human reason."
As further explained by Oldmeadow, metaphysical truth "has nothing to do with personal opinion, originality, or creativity -- quite the contrary. It is directed towards those realities which lie outside mental perimeters and which are unchanging. The most a metaphysician will ever want to do is reformulate some timeless truth so that it becomes more intelligible in the prevailing climate." Indeed that is the whole purpose of my book and this blog -- it's why I tried to make the book a metaphysical joyread, and to make cosmic truth fun for the whole family!
Thus, when the Founders said, "we hold these truths to be self-evident," they were not appealing to mere logic, but to something much higher -- something eternal, axial, and principial, in this or any other cosmos. They were not conveying to King George what they "thought" about reality, but they were disclosing and imparting this transcendent reality to the monarch. These principles would still be true if not a single human being were aware of them -- which, strictly speaking, is impossible, being that the human, qua human, is the being that is by definition conformed or "proportioned" to the absolute. Humans and humans alone are the cosmic mediators between time and eternity, God and creation, vertical and horizontal -- which is why we may know eternal Truth and conform ourselves to it. Or not.
In short, because we possess free will (freedom being one of the Divine attributes reflected in the human being) we may incarnate Truth or uncarnate the Lie. It's all up -- or down -- to you.
*****
Dr. Sanity brings attention to the same unprincipled leftist principles in her post Morally Twisted, which gets into the question of why the worthless Palestinians get so much more attention than the worthy Tibetans. Read the whole thing, as it really lays bare the broken moral compass of the left:
"In the holy book of leftist belief, 'victimhood' is the most celebrated quality deserving of attention and pity. This is in part because many on the political left have a pathologically narcissistic need to see themselves as 'champions of the oppressed', hence the constant need to find and maintain an oppressed class of people to champion. But it also dovetails nicely into the the Marxist dialectic that underlies that ideology. The world is divided up into two groups, you see: the oppressors (i.e., white, male,heterosexual, Republican, Americans or Israelis) and the oppressed (everyone else)....
"Now compare and contrast the Palestinians with the relatively gentle culture of Tibet and the non-violent philosophy of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. You can also compare and contrast the deliberate brutality of China and its Communist leadership with Israel. China's brutality and oppression is almost always given a free pass by the left in much the same way they have extended to Fidel Castro and other despotic totalitarian and authoritarian regimes their devoted loyalty and sympathy. Israel, as a Democratic and morally conscious nation actually works hard to spare innocent human life is automatically condemned whenever they respond to Palestinian provocation simply because it represents Western values and is by definition of the neo-marxists of our day, an 'official' oppressor. The left always calls Israel's response to the provocations 'disproportionate'; but in reality, it is the left's moral equivalence that is so disgustingly disproportionate."
This is because, in the absence of absolute principles to guide them, humans are reduced to something slightly below the animal kingdom, in that we have their form but not their nobility, restraint, and common sense. Rather, we are like "animals gone wild," somehow liberated from our genetic program to undo nature's delicate balance and wreak havoc on the planet. Any good "environmentalist" will tell you this.
My point is that the left can have no "eternal principles" on pain of immediate and final self-refutation. Therefore, it must obscure its absence of principles with constant tactical maneuvers that change from day to day, week to week, and year to year. Obviously, if you deny what Schuon calls the higher "principial" realm -- which contains the absolute and eternal metaphysical principles of which this lower world is an instantiation -- you can only live in a kind of "absolute relativity," which, if you give it a moment's thought, is intrinsically absurd. Frankly, it is metaphysically impossible, as relativity would then be absolute, thus negating itself. Obviously, cultural and moral relativism are intrinsically absurd and self-negating as well.
Walker highlights this absurdity of the left, in that it hews to faux-eternal principles which can never change irrespective of what actually happens in what they ironically call "reality," being that reality for them is reduced to the flatland, material world. For example, Walker asks, "How many 'civil rights' leaders talk as if racism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? How many feminist leaders talk as if sexism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? The mere passage of years, the mere enactment of statutes or adoption of polices, the decades long public relations campaign against bigotry -- none of this can be allowed to make a difference" (emphasis mine).
But why does the left embrace a kind of bitter and reactionary anti-theology, in which they hold to such a negative view of the world despite what actually occurs here? As Walker writes, "the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex."
But here again we can see that the left is not guided by true principles, for example, the truly eternal principle that "all men are created equal." Rather, for the left, "it is crucial that the sin is not racism or sexism, but specifically American (or, perhaps, Western) racism and sexism." If the crimes aren't committed by white Westerners, feminists aren't interested. They will yawn "when told about honor murders, female circumcision and the imprisonment of rape victims," so long as non-Christian people of color are responsible. "The catechism of the Left is that America is evil," not that rape or honor killing are evil.
So the true motive that animates the left is not a "positive" principle such as equality, much less liberty, but an anti-principle. And this is why it takes such diverse forms, as the leftist must always fool you (and, more importantly, himself) into believing that he is defending eternal principles, principles in which he doesn't actually believe. For example, the left universally believes that it is proper for the government to discriminate on the basis of race, "gender" and "sexual orientation", and that failure to do so should be illegal. Not surprisingly, the party of trial lawyers loves these kinds of laws, because trial lawyers are the group that most benefits from this crass power grab in the guise of a principle.
The left once unanimously maintained that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But the fact that they so readily abandoned this principle shows how they are always rooted in tactics, not principles. Likewise, up until the late '60s and early '70s, the left was a vocal supporter of Israel, whereas now all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world emanates from the left (including, of course, the Obama campaign (cf here).
America's founders were (among other things) political mystics, in that they did not "deduce" the spiritual principles upon which the country was founded, but saw into the realm where they eternally abide. The intellect "sees" these principles with absolute certainty, "light to light," so to speak. As Schuon explains, "Metaphysical truths are by no means accepted because they are merely logically clear, but because they are ontologically clear, and their logical clarity is only a trace of this imprinted on the mind." Here again, this kind of higher truth is "not held to be true -- by those who understand it -- because it is expressed in a logical manner, but it can be expressed in a logical manner because it is true, without -- obviously -- its truth ever being compromised by the possible shortcomings of human reason."
As further explained by Oldmeadow, metaphysical truth "has nothing to do with personal opinion, originality, or creativity -- quite the contrary. It is directed towards those realities which lie outside mental perimeters and which are unchanging. The most a metaphysician will ever want to do is reformulate some timeless truth so that it becomes more intelligible in the prevailing climate." Indeed that is the whole purpose of my book and this blog -- it's why I tried to make the book a metaphysical joyread, and to make cosmic truth fun for the whole family!
Thus, when the Founders said, "we hold these truths to be self-evident," they were not appealing to mere logic, but to something much higher -- something eternal, axial, and principial, in this or any other cosmos. They were not conveying to King George what they "thought" about reality, but they were disclosing and imparting this transcendent reality to the monarch. These principles would still be true if not a single human being were aware of them -- which, strictly speaking, is impossible, being that the human, qua human, is the being that is by definition conformed or "proportioned" to the absolute. Humans and humans alone are the cosmic mediators between time and eternity, God and creation, vertical and horizontal -- which is why we may know eternal Truth and conform ourselves to it. Or not.
In short, because we possess free will (freedom being one of the Divine attributes reflected in the human being) we may incarnate Truth or uncarnate the Lie. It's all up -- or down -- to you.
*****
Dr. Sanity brings attention to the same unprincipled leftist principles in her post Morally Twisted, which gets into the question of why the worthless Palestinians get so much more attention than the worthy Tibetans. Read the whole thing, as it really lays bare the broken moral compass of the left:
"In the holy book of leftist belief, 'victimhood' is the most celebrated quality deserving of attention and pity. This is in part because many on the political left have a pathologically narcissistic need to see themselves as 'champions of the oppressed', hence the constant need to find and maintain an oppressed class of people to champion. But it also dovetails nicely into the the Marxist dialectic that underlies that ideology. The world is divided up into two groups, you see: the oppressors (i.e., white, male,heterosexual, Republican, Americans or Israelis) and the oppressed (everyone else)....
"Now compare and contrast the Palestinians with the relatively gentle culture of Tibet and the non-violent philosophy of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. You can also compare and contrast the deliberate brutality of China and its Communist leadership with Israel. China's brutality and oppression is almost always given a free pass by the left in much the same way they have extended to Fidel Castro and other despotic totalitarian and authoritarian regimes their devoted loyalty and sympathy. Israel, as a Democratic and morally conscious nation actually works hard to spare innocent human life is automatically condemned whenever they respond to Palestinian provocation simply because it represents Western values and is by definition of the neo-marxists of our day, an 'official' oppressor. The left always calls Israel's response to the provocations 'disproportionate'; but in reality, it is the left's moral equivalence that is so disgustingly disproportionate."
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Cosmic Forces and Terrestrial Farces (3.11.10)
We live in a world of forces.
Duh. What an insipid way to start a post.
No, wait. I don't just mean physical forces, but mental forces, spiritual forces, and even "wealth forces." For example, at American Digest there is a quote from the Adam Smith Institute to the effect that there are no causes of poverty, being that it is obviously the "natural condition." There are no wealthy animals. Poverty "is the rest state, that which happens when you don't do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. For most of humanity's existence on this planet, poverty has been the norm, the natural condition."
Poverty just is. It doesn't become an actual force until the left takes over and begins to magically "create poverty" with bad ideas. There are no wealthy animals, and human wealth only began to exist on a widespread scale in the past couple of hundred years. There are forces that result in wealth, such as human creativity, initiative, vision, risk, etc: "We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them. When you ask the wrong question, 'What causes poverty,' you end up with wrong answers.... Instead of trying to take wealth away from rich people and redistribute it, we should be seeking to implement the conditions in which as many people as possible can join in the wealth-creating process for themselves." Thus, the first law of wealth is "get off your ass." The second is "get the government off your ass."
In the mental realm, truth is a force. In fact, it is without question the most important force. Some people -- mostly aging hippies and addle-brained youths, who represent the two main constituencies of the left, wacktivists and hedonists -- will tell you that love is the most important force, but love is a derivative of Truth, not vice versa. I do not worship "the God of love" unless he is first the God of Truth, for who besides a leftist would worship a lovely liar like Marx or Obama?
Hmm, I read something to this effect just the other day.... Where was it.... Yes, here it is, by you-know-who, Mr. Gnosis-all: "God is 'Light' before He is 'Heat,' if it may be so expressed; gnosis 'precedes' love, or rather, love 'follows' gnosis, since the latter includes love after its own fashion...." Schuon goes on to explain that "one can love something false, without love ceasing to be what it is; but one cannot 'know' the false in a similar way, that is to say knowledge cannot be under illusion as to its object without ceasing to be what it is; error always implies a privation of knowledge, whereas sin does not imply a privation of will."
Although the lie -- being a privation -- has no "absolute" existence, it does represent a potent "counter-force" on the horizontal plane. In fact, if you think about it for even a moment, it has possibly had an even greater impact and influence on the world than truth. Or at the very least, it is a constant battle. Truth is always embattled on all sides, just as light is surrounded by darkness. Only by positing something "fundamentally wrong" with humans can you explain their constant attraction to the Lie. The bigger they are, the harder we fall.
You'd think it would be uncontroversial to utter a simple truth, but you'd be wrong, wouldn't you? I am reminded of Obama's shamelessly opportunistic and manipulative "dialogue about race," when the whole reason we cannot say anything useful or productive about race is that the left will brand you as racist if you do. It seems that to carry Truth is to pick up a cross and paint a target on one's back.
Animals cannot lie. While they can have certain naturally selected mechanisms of deception, they certainly cannot live a lie. But living a lie is in the normal course of events for human beings. Someone said that language was given to man so as to conceal his thoughts. Interestingly, this problem is fully recognized in scripture, as the very first conversations recorded in the Bible are lies. The serpent lies to the woman, the woman transmits the lie to the man, and the man lies about it to God, and then a rebellious angel leaks it to the Times. The very emergence of self-consciousness seems to be inseparable from lying.
So lying is absolutely fundamental to human existence, a fact that wasn't systematized until the early 20th century, in the works of Freud (the good Freud) and his followers. In particular, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion developed a sophisticated epistemology showing how a vital lie is at the basis of most all forms of psychopathology (at least those that aren't mainly genetic and/or biochemical). Once the lie is in place, it causes the psyche to enter a sort of parallel universe, for it constructs itself on the foundations of that initial falsehood.
A mind parasite is essentially an internalized lie that takes on a pseudo-life of its own. I believe the term is an accurate one, for it is meant to convey the idea that a vital lie that lodges itself in the psyche is not static, but takes on the characteristics of the host, so to speak. I remember once discussing this with my analyst. I don't remember the exact context of the problem I was whining about, but he said words to the effect of, "What do you expect? It's as smart as you are."
In other words, the mind parasite has available to it all of the elaborate machinery of the mind. Therefore, it can easily justify itself, elaborate itself, gang up on the truth, intimidate healthier parts of the psyche. It's like a dictator who uses legitimate means to come to power, but then corruptly uses all of the levers of power to stay there and eliminate opponents.
Those who are in thrall to the lie are by definition slaves. While they may enjoy a subjective sense of freedom, it is an illusion. In fact, they have forfeited their freedom and are attached to a monstrous demon that they have generated out of their own psychic substance, in the same way that a spider weaves a web out of its own body.
Think of a vivid example that is readily at hand -- the Islamists. Is it not obvious that they are absolutely enslaved by artificial beings of their own creation? And that they want everyone else to be enslaved by the same demon? Does this not demonstrate the insane power of demons?
There are personal mind parasites and collective mind parasites. Many cultures revolve entirely around monstrous entities that have been engendered by whole communities, such as the Aztec. Here again, it would be wrong to say that the Aztec had a "bloodthirsty god" -- rather, it clearly had them. Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed to satisfy this god's appetite for human blood, elaborate mechanisms set up to supply fresh bodies, the heart of the sacrificial victim cut out by the officiating priest who would himself take a bite out of it while it was still beating. A whole society of Jeffrey Dahmers trying desperately to allay anxiety by vampirically ingesting the life force of others. The Islamists are just the latest idition of this unconscious anti-religion. But you undoubtedly know some people in your own life who do the same thing -- hungry ghosts who "feed" on the spirit or blog of others.
In all times and in all places, human beings have looked for ways to objectify and worship their self-created demons. This is preferable to having them run around loose in one's own psyche. Take again the example of the Islamist. How would one even begin to tell him: "you have a persecutory entity inside of you that your life revolves around. You have placed it outside of yourself so as to make your life bearable, for it conceals a truth that is too painful to endure."
To a large extent, this dynamic is at the heart of more mundane politics as well. For those who do not experience George Bush as a demon, it is almost impossible to understand those who do, any more than we can really understand the motivations of the Aztec. The collective mind parasite has a grammar and logic all its own, inaccessible to all but initiates into the Lie.
You don't actually want to get that close to an intoxicating Lie of that magnitude. It's not safe. Better to observe it from a respectful distance. Otherwise, you will find yourself pulled down into a false world of counter-lying rather than simple truth. You cannot create an artificial "good demon,” which is what secular leftists are trying to do when they aren't creating bad ones. Those who criticize my "negativity" probably think I am engaging in the former -- heatedly countering the lie -- when I am calmly engaged in the latter -- simply affirming the truth that is and has always been. This is the inner meaning of "resist not evil." Resist it in the wrong way, and you come into its orbit.
For as old Anonymous points out, a demon operates through a combination of will and imagination. You may think of perverse will as the male principle and perverse imagination as the female principle. Together they beget the demon child that then controls the parents, taking over both will and imagination. C onsider how so much art and academic nonsense is nothing more than the elaboration of the perverse imagination -- ideological superstructures giving cover to lies of various magnitude. Think of how much "activism" is simply the angry agitation of the perverse will, just the punitive hedonism of a corrupt superego.
This is the inner meaning of "you shall not make for yourself a graven image," for Truth is a living thing, a Being, that cannot be reduced to the idolatrous systems of men, especially corrupted men who do not honor Truth to begin with. Most modern and postmodern ideologies and philosophies are opiates of elites too sophisticated for such powerful pneumaceuticals as Truth.
And this is the inner meaning of "honor your father and mother”: not rebelling against received truth and tradition in an adolescent manner, especially before you are even mature enough to understand what it means. But the Obamaniacs will always be with us in one form or another.
Duh. What an insipid way to start a post.
No, wait. I don't just mean physical forces, but mental forces, spiritual forces, and even "wealth forces." For example, at American Digest there is a quote from the Adam Smith Institute to the effect that there are no causes of poverty, being that it is obviously the "natural condition." There are no wealthy animals. Poverty "is the rest state, that which happens when you don't do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. For most of humanity's existence on this planet, poverty has been the norm, the natural condition."
Poverty just is. It doesn't become an actual force until the left takes over and begins to magically "create poverty" with bad ideas. There are no wealthy animals, and human wealth only began to exist on a widespread scale in the past couple of hundred years. There are forces that result in wealth, such as human creativity, initiative, vision, risk, etc: "We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them. When you ask the wrong question, 'What causes poverty,' you end up with wrong answers.... Instead of trying to take wealth away from rich people and redistribute it, we should be seeking to implement the conditions in which as many people as possible can join in the wealth-creating process for themselves." Thus, the first law of wealth is "get off your ass." The second is "get the government off your ass."
In the mental realm, truth is a force. In fact, it is without question the most important force. Some people -- mostly aging hippies and addle-brained youths, who represent the two main constituencies of the left, wacktivists and hedonists -- will tell you that love is the most important force, but love is a derivative of Truth, not vice versa. I do not worship "the God of love" unless he is first the God of Truth, for who besides a leftist would worship a lovely liar like Marx or Obama?
Hmm, I read something to this effect just the other day.... Where was it.... Yes, here it is, by you-know-who, Mr. Gnosis-all: "God is 'Light' before He is 'Heat,' if it may be so expressed; gnosis 'precedes' love, or rather, love 'follows' gnosis, since the latter includes love after its own fashion...." Schuon goes on to explain that "one can love something false, without love ceasing to be what it is; but one cannot 'know' the false in a similar way, that is to say knowledge cannot be under illusion as to its object without ceasing to be what it is; error always implies a privation of knowledge, whereas sin does not imply a privation of will."
Although the lie -- being a privation -- has no "absolute" existence, it does represent a potent "counter-force" on the horizontal plane. In fact, if you think about it for even a moment, it has possibly had an even greater impact and influence on the world than truth. Or at the very least, it is a constant battle. Truth is always embattled on all sides, just as light is surrounded by darkness. Only by positing something "fundamentally wrong" with humans can you explain their constant attraction to the Lie. The bigger they are, the harder we fall.
You'd think it would be uncontroversial to utter a simple truth, but you'd be wrong, wouldn't you? I am reminded of Obama's shamelessly opportunistic and manipulative "dialogue about race," when the whole reason we cannot say anything useful or productive about race is that the left will brand you as racist if you do. It seems that to carry Truth is to pick up a cross and paint a target on one's back.
Animals cannot lie. While they can have certain naturally selected mechanisms of deception, they certainly cannot live a lie. But living a lie is in the normal course of events for human beings. Someone said that language was given to man so as to conceal his thoughts. Interestingly, this problem is fully recognized in scripture, as the very first conversations recorded in the Bible are lies. The serpent lies to the woman, the woman transmits the lie to the man, and the man lies about it to God, and then a rebellious angel leaks it to the Times. The very emergence of self-consciousness seems to be inseparable from lying.
So lying is absolutely fundamental to human existence, a fact that wasn't systematized until the early 20th century, in the works of Freud (the good Freud) and his followers. In particular, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion developed a sophisticated epistemology showing how a vital lie is at the basis of most all forms of psychopathology (at least those that aren't mainly genetic and/or biochemical). Once the lie is in place, it causes the psyche to enter a sort of parallel universe, for it constructs itself on the foundations of that initial falsehood.
A mind parasite is essentially an internalized lie that takes on a pseudo-life of its own. I believe the term is an accurate one, for it is meant to convey the idea that a vital lie that lodges itself in the psyche is not static, but takes on the characteristics of the host, so to speak. I remember once discussing this with my analyst. I don't remember the exact context of the problem I was whining about, but he said words to the effect of, "What do you expect? It's as smart as you are."
In other words, the mind parasite has available to it all of the elaborate machinery of the mind. Therefore, it can easily justify itself, elaborate itself, gang up on the truth, intimidate healthier parts of the psyche. It's like a dictator who uses legitimate means to come to power, but then corruptly uses all of the levers of power to stay there and eliminate opponents.
Those who are in thrall to the lie are by definition slaves. While they may enjoy a subjective sense of freedom, it is an illusion. In fact, they have forfeited their freedom and are attached to a monstrous demon that they have generated out of their own psychic substance, in the same way that a spider weaves a web out of its own body.
Think of a vivid example that is readily at hand -- the Islamists. Is it not obvious that they are absolutely enslaved by artificial beings of their own creation? And that they want everyone else to be enslaved by the same demon? Does this not demonstrate the insane power of demons?
There are personal mind parasites and collective mind parasites. Many cultures revolve entirely around monstrous entities that have been engendered by whole communities, such as the Aztec. Here again, it would be wrong to say that the Aztec had a "bloodthirsty god" -- rather, it clearly had them. Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed to satisfy this god's appetite for human blood, elaborate mechanisms set up to supply fresh bodies, the heart of the sacrificial victim cut out by the officiating priest who would himself take a bite out of it while it was still beating. A whole society of Jeffrey Dahmers trying desperately to allay anxiety by vampirically ingesting the life force of others. The Islamists are just the latest idition of this unconscious anti-religion. But you undoubtedly know some people in your own life who do the same thing -- hungry ghosts who "feed" on the spirit or blog of others.
In all times and in all places, human beings have looked for ways to objectify and worship their self-created demons. This is preferable to having them run around loose in one's own psyche. Take again the example of the Islamist. How would one even begin to tell him: "you have a persecutory entity inside of you that your life revolves around. You have placed it outside of yourself so as to make your life bearable, for it conceals a truth that is too painful to endure."
To a large extent, this dynamic is at the heart of more mundane politics as well. For those who do not experience George Bush as a demon, it is almost impossible to understand those who do, any more than we can really understand the motivations of the Aztec. The collective mind parasite has a grammar and logic all its own, inaccessible to all but initiates into the Lie.
You don't actually want to get that close to an intoxicating Lie of that magnitude. It's not safe. Better to observe it from a respectful distance. Otherwise, you will find yourself pulled down into a false world of counter-lying rather than simple truth. You cannot create an artificial "good demon,” which is what secular leftists are trying to do when they aren't creating bad ones. Those who criticize my "negativity" probably think I am engaging in the former -- heatedly countering the lie -- when I am calmly engaged in the latter -- simply affirming the truth that is and has always been. This is the inner meaning of "resist not evil." Resist it in the wrong way, and you come into its orbit.
For as old Anonymous points out, a demon operates through a combination of will and imagination. You may think of perverse will as the male principle and perverse imagination as the female principle. Together they beget the demon child that then controls the parents, taking over both will and imagination. C onsider how so much art and academic nonsense is nothing more than the elaboration of the perverse imagination -- ideological superstructures giving cover to lies of various magnitude. Think of how much "activism" is simply the angry agitation of the perverse will, just the punitive hedonism of a corrupt superego.
This is the inner meaning of "you shall not make for yourself a graven image," for Truth is a living thing, a Being, that cannot be reduced to the idolatrous systems of men, especially corrupted men who do not honor Truth to begin with. Most modern and postmodern ideologies and philosophies are opiates of elites too sophisticated for such powerful pneumaceuticals as Truth.
And this is the inner meaning of "honor your father and mother”: not rebelling against received truth and tradition in an adolescent manner, especially before you are even mature enough to understand what it means. But the Obamaniacs will always be with us in one form or another.
Monday, March 24, 2008
How to Use Your Brain to Your Eternal Advantage
When I began blogging, I started the habit of jotting down any thoughtlets or ideas for ideas, so as not to lose them. It was only once I began paying attention to them that I realized how many thoughts our minds are host to.
The exact number -- see page 294, footnote 76 of your Coonifesto -- is 4,000 distinct thoughts in a typical day in the life, one hundred million in an average lifetime. Thus, now we know how many thoughts it takes to fill the average soul (I'd lo-o-o-o-ve to tur-r-r-r-r-r-n th-e-e-e-e-e-e-m off-f-f-f-f-f).
But not all of them, just the worthless ones.
For better or worse, this is where all the puns come from. As I explained in a previous post -- just like those other four blind dumbos -- once I set myself to the elaphantine tusk of trying to describe the translinguistic object with mere language, the words began streaking into my head like shooting stars, or like sparks thrown out of a campy fire. And, like shooting stars, these eternal jokes would only be risible for a moment before passing into perhaps well-deserved bobscurity, so I had to seize them as soon as they passed through bobworld -- not just the wordplay, but the wordwork as well -- you know, the so-called ideas.
Now, everyone knows that some atmaspheric conditions are preferable when you are attempting to gaze at those fixed stars that are muddled in broad daylight. And even then, most of the stars can't be seen by looking directly at them. Rather, analogous to ego death, you can only see them out of the coroner of your I.
In this regard, the problem is similar to what we were discussing last Friday, with the differences between the two cerebral hemispheres. If the left hemisphere is the home of daytime, "wideawake and cutandry" consciousness, then the right side is where we have sufficient darkness to read the Evening World.
It's not so much the content but the mode of consciousness that is so important. However, at the same time, the two modes specialize in very different kinds of content, in that the left mode specializes in digital exhuminations of "dead" knowledge, whereas right mode excels in analogical and symbolic knowing, or a kind of "living" knowledge of Being itself. Therefore, at the very least, it's important to "feed" it with a daily diet of richly resonant starries at breadtime, or you won't mythunderstand a thing about your life. In fact, the soul has always been understood as "passive" or "feminine" in relation to O, which is why we pray, "give us this day our daily broad."
I'm pretty sure that most of you have by now noticed that the quality of thoughts that pass into your night noggin has a lot to do with the seeds you plant there by day (insert appropriate scriptural passage by Nomo here). I don't want to get sidetracked here into making an actually useful point, but this is what I was attempting to convey yesterday with my Easter bungle of a post. Let's take someone like, I don't know, Van der Leun. He is not what you would call an orthodox "believer," but nor is he a "non-believer."
But I also wouldn't place him in the category of "a-gnostic," the reason being that he clearly is, as is soph-evident to so many of his readers. When he "dwells" in spiritual topics, the light is there for all to see. In the skillful unKnowing is concealed the knowing. It reminds me of a wise crack by Schuon, who said something to the effect that "poorly posed questions no more attract the light than they are derived from it," but that "a good question can be derived from the very light it seeks." Likewise, a good quest creates its own journey.
In this regard, have you noticed that whenever one of our trolls confronts us with one of their Opaque questions, we know in advance that there is no answer that will satisfy them, since there is no "light" in the question? Rather, the question -- which is derived from darkness -- seeks only the darkness it needs to illuminate its error and imbue it with a false "light." This is pretty much a summary of the atheist mind, which is the very embodiment of self-confirming false light.
My point is that there are many ways to prove the existence of God -- or let us just say O. One way for the intellectually gifted person -- whose very gift might, under modern conditions, turn him away from O -- is to immerse himself in these traditional, "timeless tested" ways of knowing the self and the cosmos, and to wait and see what your right brain does with them. In ether worlds, when we dwell imaginatively in revelation -- and I don't mean to think critically about it in the manner of the left brain, but to dive into its world with the right -- something happens. I guess my point is that you can still gnaw God even if you can't swallow everything about organized religion.
You don't have to read too many serious spiritual autobiographies -- by which I mean autobiographies of serious people -- to hear this story again and again, under widely divergent personal and cultural circumstances, from a St. Augustine to a T.S. Eliot to countless others. Augustine, for example, was probably the smartest guy alive in his day -- or at least we have no documentary evidence of a sharper bulb in the ancient knifesocket. But his mind wasn't "illuminated" until it abandoned itself to the luminous obscurity of faith, at which time the outpouring of (n) never stopped, and he became a veritable fount of O.
Now, one important point is that, once this happens, you don't arrive at any "finality." Rather, in an analogy I have stolen in the past, it's as if the soul is a series of concentric circles, only as you move toward the center -- unlike left-brained Euclidean geopneumography -- each successive circle is bigger, until you get to the center, which is infinite.
We know this is true, because we know of a number of transhistorical personagelesses who did not just speak from that infinite circle, but became it, for example, Ramana Maharshi, Meister Eckhart, Shankara, Denys the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Sri Aurobindo, and countless others. Scripture itself is O objectified, where as these diverse spiritual maestros represent O subjectivized, so to speak.
Well, I have almost no time this morning, being that I caught a cold and overslept. Plus I'm behind in my work-work, and had better get started on it. I was going to use this post as an excuse to clear my files of a few dozen incomplete thoughts from my overflOwing (n)otebooks, but I guess my oriental brain occidentally came down with enough for a post.
Escape your left-brained cage once in awhile and check out the wider world:
The exact number -- see page 294, footnote 76 of your Coonifesto -- is 4,000 distinct thoughts in a typical day in the life, one hundred million in an average lifetime. Thus, now we know how many thoughts it takes to fill the average soul (I'd lo-o-o-o-ve to tur-r-r-r-r-r-n th-e-e-e-e-e-e-m off-f-f-f-f-f).
But not all of them, just the worthless ones.
For better or worse, this is where all the puns come from. As I explained in a previous post -- just like those other four blind dumbos -- once I set myself to the elaphantine tusk of trying to describe the translinguistic object with mere language, the words began streaking into my head like shooting stars, or like sparks thrown out of a campy fire. And, like shooting stars, these eternal jokes would only be risible for a moment before passing into perhaps well-deserved bobscurity, so I had to seize them as soon as they passed through bobworld -- not just the wordplay, but the wordwork as well -- you know, the so-called ideas.
Now, everyone knows that some atmaspheric conditions are preferable when you are attempting to gaze at those fixed stars that are muddled in broad daylight. And even then, most of the stars can't be seen by looking directly at them. Rather, analogous to ego death, you can only see them out of the coroner of your I.
In this regard, the problem is similar to what we were discussing last Friday, with the differences between the two cerebral hemispheres. If the left hemisphere is the home of daytime, "wideawake and cutandry" consciousness, then the right side is where we have sufficient darkness to read the Evening World.
It's not so much the content but the mode of consciousness that is so important. However, at the same time, the two modes specialize in very different kinds of content, in that the left mode specializes in digital exhuminations of "dead" knowledge, whereas right mode excels in analogical and symbolic knowing, or a kind of "living" knowledge of Being itself. Therefore, at the very least, it's important to "feed" it with a daily diet of richly resonant starries at breadtime, or you won't mythunderstand a thing about your life. In fact, the soul has always been understood as "passive" or "feminine" in relation to O, which is why we pray, "give us this day our daily broad."
I'm pretty sure that most of you have by now noticed that the quality of thoughts that pass into your night noggin has a lot to do with the seeds you plant there by day (insert appropriate scriptural passage by Nomo here). I don't want to get sidetracked here into making an actually useful point, but this is what I was attempting to convey yesterday with my Easter bungle of a post. Let's take someone like, I don't know, Van der Leun. He is not what you would call an orthodox "believer," but nor is he a "non-believer."
But I also wouldn't place him in the category of "a-gnostic," the reason being that he clearly is, as is soph-evident to so many of his readers. When he "dwells" in spiritual topics, the light is there for all to see. In the skillful unKnowing is concealed the knowing. It reminds me of a wise crack by Schuon, who said something to the effect that "poorly posed questions no more attract the light than they are derived from it," but that "a good question can be derived from the very light it seeks." Likewise, a good quest creates its own journey.
In this regard, have you noticed that whenever one of our trolls confronts us with one of their Opaque questions, we know in advance that there is no answer that will satisfy them, since there is no "light" in the question? Rather, the question -- which is derived from darkness -- seeks only the darkness it needs to illuminate its error and imbue it with a false "light." This is pretty much a summary of the atheist mind, which is the very embodiment of self-confirming false light.
My point is that there are many ways to prove the existence of God -- or let us just say O. One way for the intellectually gifted person -- whose very gift might, under modern conditions, turn him away from O -- is to immerse himself in these traditional, "timeless tested" ways of knowing the self and the cosmos, and to wait and see what your right brain does with them. In ether worlds, when we dwell imaginatively in revelation -- and I don't mean to think critically about it in the manner of the left brain, but to dive into its world with the right -- something happens. I guess my point is that you can still gnaw God even if you can't swallow everything about organized religion.
You don't have to read too many serious spiritual autobiographies -- by which I mean autobiographies of serious people -- to hear this story again and again, under widely divergent personal and cultural circumstances, from a St. Augustine to a T.S. Eliot to countless others. Augustine, for example, was probably the smartest guy alive in his day -- or at least we have no documentary evidence of a sharper bulb in the ancient knifesocket. But his mind wasn't "illuminated" until it abandoned itself to the luminous obscurity of faith, at which time the outpouring of (n) never stopped, and he became a veritable fount of O.
Now, one important point is that, once this happens, you don't arrive at any "finality." Rather, in an analogy I have stolen in the past, it's as if the soul is a series of concentric circles, only as you move toward the center -- unlike left-brained Euclidean geopneumography -- each successive circle is bigger, until you get to the center, which is infinite.
We know this is true, because we know of a number of transhistorical personagelesses who did not just speak from that infinite circle, but became it, for example, Ramana Maharshi, Meister Eckhart, Shankara, Denys the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Sri Aurobindo, and countless others. Scripture itself is O objectified, where as these diverse spiritual maestros represent O subjectivized, so to speak.
Well, I have almost no time this morning, being that I caught a cold and overslept. Plus I'm behind in my work-work, and had better get started on it. I was going to use this post as an excuse to clear my files of a few dozen incomplete thoughts from my overflOwing (n)otebooks, but I guess my oriental brain occidentally came down with enough for a post.
Escape your left-brained cage once in awhile and check out the wider world:
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Petey's Easter Message: Hooray! Surrection!
This is just a rambling compilation of past Easter posts. Not sure if they make much sense or even nonsense. I'll let you decide.
***
Here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You knew the One. Around Eve, it was. It's a hiss & her story, he shed we dead, but insurrection comes to resurrection in the serpentine foulness of time, at the bar of history. So a beery Hoppy Yeaster to you ale, the whole brewed!
Aside from that, what can one possibly say about Easter that hasn't been said in the past 1975 years, give or take? Somehow, despite all that has been said and written about it for hundreds and hundreds of years, there is always more to say. It is incapable of becoming saturated. You think you're looking at it, but it is always looking through you. It is actually a means with which to look at the the world, especially the deep vertical world.
Because of its specifically "unsaturatable" quality, we can never really comprehend a divine revelation, in the literal sense of "wrapping our understanding" around it. Rather, try as we might, it is always comprehending us. Furthermore, paradoxically, the more of it we comprehend, the more it comprehends us.
How can this be? It is the reverse of becoming an "expert" at something. An expert knows everything about something that is ultimately about nothing. But spiritual growth involves the constant rediscovery that you know what amounts to nothing about the ultimate something. You are a lifetime apprentice, apophatic nonentity. It is constantly instructing you.
Mouravieff writes that unless one is unusually saintly, one will not be able to travel the path of the Way without a kind of death, "without first passing through an interior bankruptcy; a moral collapse." Paradoxically -- but not really -- Mouravieff notes that for most men, "success and joy, instead of awakening them, plunge them into mental sleep." Thus, "from the esoteric point of view, disagreeable shocks are a better base for work than happy accidents."
For one thing, these shocks will tend to ground one in the sense of humility that is demanded of anyone on the spiritual path. Best to start off broken than to fall from a much greater height later on. When we fall, we only fall back to the ground. For those who believe themselves to be high above the ground, the height is only in their imagination anyway.
A number of Coons have mentioned recently that they have been undergoing a sort of "reversal," in which worldly things that used to interest and excite them no longer do so. It is not a transformation they have consciously willed, but it is simply happening of its own accord. It seems that this is an inevitable consequence of increasingly living one's life in the light of the Real or Absolute. It is the death of one mode of being, accompanied by the birth of another.
2000 years ago, Rome certainly represented the world. It had always been and would always be, and it certainly would not tolerate someone who presumed to live -- and taught others how to live -- outside its strict boundaries. But like everything else on the horizontal plane, Rome had a beginning and an end. However, the vertical principle they attempted to extinguish proved to be only a beginning, as it always is.
For horizontal man, there truly is no exit to their absurcular existence. The cosmos is a closed circle with no doorway in, up, or out. Life is a straight line with a period at the end of the death sentence. Period.
In manifesting his celestial nature on earth, Jesus did not seem particularly concerned about making it fully intelligible, at least in words. After all, that's why we're still talking and arguing about it two thousand years later. He simply incarnated his cosmic destiny and largely left it for others to figure out. What did it all mean? What could it possibly mean?
Rudolf Steiner wrote something to the effect that "the secrets of the Mysteries became wholly manifest in Christianity."
An anonymous Greek Orthodox theologian remarked that "We do not ask whether or not the resurrection happened. It is the horizon in which we live." Dwelling within this vertical horizon is a way to contemplate reality at its deepest level -- a level that is well beyond mere discursive thought. I'm not sure if this is fully kosher, but I understand the Father as the eternally transcendent aspect of God, the Son as the immanent aspect. How to reconcile them?
Perhaps they were only ever separated by the illusory veil of death. It is said that upon Jesus’ death, the temple veil was rent vertically from top to bottom. The resurrection is reality unveiled, which is to say reveiled, for it is a mysterious new veil with which to engage reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms.
The Catholic theologian von Balthasar wrote that "truth is the unconcealment of being, while... the someone to whom being is unconcealed is God."
In a similar vein, Lucy Beckett writes that "If God does not exist, the transcendent has been wiped away, there is no longer a vertical axis for the human soul, but only a horizontal, that is, a historical, axis for the human mind. More particularly, the vertical never crossed the horizontal in the Incarnation."
Nor in us. Now that would be a real inconveyance, not to mention, folly -- to be up to Greek without any kenosis.
***
Here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You knew the One. Around Eve, it was. It's a hiss & her story, he shed we dead, but insurrection comes to resurrection in the serpentine foulness of time, at the bar of history. So a beery Hoppy Yeaster to you ale, the whole brewed!
Aside from that, what can one possibly say about Easter that hasn't been said in the past 1975 years, give or take? Somehow, despite all that has been said and written about it for hundreds and hundreds of years, there is always more to say. It is incapable of becoming saturated. You think you're looking at it, but it is always looking through you. It is actually a means with which to look at the the world, especially the deep vertical world.
Because of its specifically "unsaturatable" quality, we can never really comprehend a divine revelation, in the literal sense of "wrapping our understanding" around it. Rather, try as we might, it is always comprehending us. Furthermore, paradoxically, the more of it we comprehend, the more it comprehends us.
How can this be? It is the reverse of becoming an "expert" at something. An expert knows everything about something that is ultimately about nothing. But spiritual growth involves the constant rediscovery that you know what amounts to nothing about the ultimate something. You are a lifetime apprentice, apophatic nonentity. It is constantly instructing you.
Mouravieff writes that unless one is unusually saintly, one will not be able to travel the path of the Way without a kind of death, "without first passing through an interior bankruptcy; a moral collapse." Paradoxically -- but not really -- Mouravieff notes that for most men, "success and joy, instead of awakening them, plunge them into mental sleep." Thus, "from the esoteric point of view, disagreeable shocks are a better base for work than happy accidents."
For one thing, these shocks will tend to ground one in the sense of humility that is demanded of anyone on the spiritual path. Best to start off broken than to fall from a much greater height later on. When we fall, we only fall back to the ground. For those who believe themselves to be high above the ground, the height is only in their imagination anyway.
A number of Coons have mentioned recently that they have been undergoing a sort of "reversal," in which worldly things that used to interest and excite them no longer do so. It is not a transformation they have consciously willed, but it is simply happening of its own accord. It seems that this is an inevitable consequence of increasingly living one's life in the light of the Real or Absolute. It is the death of one mode of being, accompanied by the birth of another.
2000 years ago, Rome certainly represented the world. It had always been and would always be, and it certainly would not tolerate someone who presumed to live -- and taught others how to live -- outside its strict boundaries. But like everything else on the horizontal plane, Rome had a beginning and an end. However, the vertical principle they attempted to extinguish proved to be only a beginning, as it always is.
For horizontal man, there truly is no exit to their absurcular existence. The cosmos is a closed circle with no doorway in, up, or out. Life is a straight line with a period at the end of the death sentence. Period.
In manifesting his celestial nature on earth, Jesus did not seem particularly concerned about making it fully intelligible, at least in words. After all, that's why we're still talking and arguing about it two thousand years later. He simply incarnated his cosmic destiny and largely left it for others to figure out. What did it all mean? What could it possibly mean?
Rudolf Steiner wrote something to the effect that "the secrets of the Mysteries became wholly manifest in Christianity."
An anonymous Greek Orthodox theologian remarked that "We do not ask whether or not the resurrection happened. It is the horizon in which we live." Dwelling within this vertical horizon is a way to contemplate reality at its deepest level -- a level that is well beyond mere discursive thought. I'm not sure if this is fully kosher, but I understand the Father as the eternally transcendent aspect of God, the Son as the immanent aspect. How to reconcile them?
Perhaps they were only ever separated by the illusory veil of death. It is said that upon Jesus’ death, the temple veil was rent vertically from top to bottom. The resurrection is reality unveiled, which is to say reveiled, for it is a mysterious new veil with which to engage reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms.
The Catholic theologian von Balthasar wrote that "truth is the unconcealment of being, while... the someone to whom being is unconcealed is God."
In a similar vein, Lucy Beckett writes that "If God does not exist, the transcendent has been wiped away, there is no longer a vertical axis for the human soul, but only a horizontal, that is, a historical, axis for the human mind. More particularly, the vertical never crossed the horizontal in the Incarnation."
Nor in us. Now that would be a real inconveyance, not to mention, folly -- to be up to Greek without any kenosis.
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