Just a short post in order to make some headway on The Tower of Destruction....
How do we prophylactically avoid having our tower blasted by the thunderbolt? Easy. We will invite a bad case of thunderclap if we misconscrew evolution. That is, to express it in biological terms, extinction -- the ultimate bolt out of the blue -- occurs as a result of overspecialization, which confers a temporary advantage but ends up "painting one into an evolutionary coroner," so to speak.
Why are human beings atop the evolutionary heap? Because we specialize in generalization, in a way that no other animal can or ever will. In human beings, intelligence has wrapped around itself in order to produce self-consciousness, and therefore abstract thinking -- or virtual manipulation in the absence of the immediate object.
In my book, I advanced a theory -- which is mine -- of how I believe it came about that human brains became capable of hosting divine souls. Again, it has to do with the evolutionary development of the neurologically incomplete and helpless infant, and all this entails (in short, the infant "creates" the empathic and caring mother, who in turn enlists the protecting father). Space doesn't permit going into all of the details here, but the point is that humanness emerges within this trialectic transitional space. Infants specialize in helplessness, which is the gateway to human generalization.
Because of this arrangement, human infancy (in the collective) represents a kind of infinite potential, which is the precise opposite of specialization. Who could say what human potential remains to be actualized? One could not say this of any other animal, for their existence and their potential are roughly equivalent. The only exception is when humans interfere and bring out potential that would have otherwise remained latent, e.g., turning a mere canine into a seeing-eye dog, or Mike Tyson into a boxer.
So human beings are the ultimate generalists, and this is one of the keys to avoiding the tower and the thunderbolt. UF writes that it involves "the way of general growth or that of 'humbling oneself to the role of a seed,'" in contrast to "the ways of specialization or those of 'exalting oneself by building towers." In short, it is the way of growth vs. the way of building.
Now, growth is not just some local biological phenomenon somehow attached to an otherwise dead and fully exterior cosmos. Frankly, it is both absurd and incoherent to suggest that interiority could have ever resulted from pure exteriority. In other words, biological, psychological, and spiritual growth are not to be thought of as bugs, but features, of the cosmos.
And what is growth? It is a kind of dynamic interior unity with a developmental vector. Growth always wishes to "realize" its possibilities, so it is unavoidably teleological. To say "growth" is to say "teleology." Otherwise it isn't growth, just "expansion" or perhaps "metastasis," that is, the disorganized manner in which a cancer "grows."
The tower -- because it is a narrow specialization -- always leads to a spiritual impasse, at least if one attempts to elevate it to a metaphysical generalization. This is what scientism does, and the spiritual consequences are obviously catastrophic, being more or less synonymous with "hell."
For example, other animals "act out" evolution, but only human beings -- because of their generalization -- know about it. As a result, evolution -- ipso facto -- can never "contain" human beings. Rather, we contain it -- so long as we are contained by O.
For ultimately, it all comes back, down, and up to O. Last night I read a nice passage by Sri Aurobindo, in which he discusses the realization of God. In it, I will substitute O for Brahman, because I think it expresses it in an exceptionally clear and concise manner (one could no doubt locate a similar passage by Eckhart or Denys):
"We have to perceive O comprehensively as both the Stable and the Moving. We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity.
"We have to perceive all things in Space and Time, the far and the near, the immemorial Past, the immediate Present, the infinite Future with all their contents and happenings as O.
"We have to perceive O as that which exceeds, contains and supports all individual things as well as all universe, transcendentally of Time and Space and Causality. We have to perceive O also as that which lives in and possesses the universe and all it contains."
This passage touches on all the main characteristics of the "higher third" of God-realization, which is the ultimate generalization, but simultaneously the ultimate specialization, in that human beings "specialize in God." For at the end of the deity, he is the vector of our interior growth. Failing to follow that vector results in a corrective thunderbolt. If you're lucky.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Erectile Dysfunction, or What the Thunder Said (12.06.11)
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying --T.S. Eliot, What the Thunder Said
I think we're through with the Devil.
On to the Tower of Destruction. This is an extremely important card, so huddle up close to the screen and turn up the volume. It has to do with human evil, or "to evil which does not come from the outside, but which certainly has its origin within the human soul" -- not from the body, which is an innocent bystander in man's vertical fall. Depending upon how you look at it, the fall has to do either with willfulness or ignorance, which leads to "illicit" or illegitimate knowledge, and separates us from the Creator. Either way -- i.e., by way of intellect or will -- human beings are exiled from the vertical and plunged into the horizontal.
Now, as UF explains, Genesis is set in a garden, which is a very different thing from a jungle -- which is completely wild -- or a desert -- which is more or less barren -- or a town -- which is a symbol of human invention, and where nothing grows spontaneously. (There is a pneumacosmic reason why the big cities are the main habitats of the Blue Meanies).
But a garden is what? It is a combination of vertical and horizontal energies, of planning and spontaneity. A beautiful garden, as the Frothy One can attest to, involves a harmonious combination of Spirit and Nature; of Spirit within nature, or Nature rising to Spirit. One thinks of Japanese gardens, which so transparently convey the supernatural within nature.
UF links this to the true mission and vocation of the Raccoon, which is "to cultivate and maintain the 'garden,' i.e. the world in a state of equilibrium and cooperation between Spirit and Nature" Coons are gardeners, not technicians (even if we do technical work). Unlike these modern excuses for gardeners, we do not merely "mow and blow." Rather, we cultivate and we maintain.
The Tower of Destruction symbolizes everything the garden is not. As UF explains, it comes about as a result of "the collective will of 'lower selves' to achieve the replacing of the 'true Self' of the celestial hierarchies and God with a superstructure of universal significance fabricated through the will." You could say that it's built prick by prick.
But the human will, alienated from spirit, cannot create anything of truly universal, or cosmic, significance. It can only create a tower, which is surely fated for the divine wrecking ball -- which is a mercy, never a punishment. For example, our scientistic jester is always kind or clueless enough to share his silly little towers with us, which we never fail to destroy at a glance. And yet, he still no doubt prefers to live amidst their haunted ruins.
For the Tower of Destruction teaches a law that is both general and universal, meaning that it "operates both on a small scale and on a grand scale, in individual biography as well as in that of mankind, and in the past, present and future equally." It is another one of those things in the Bible that didn't just happen once upon a time, but which happen every time. I read yesterday that the Pope had a prophecy of the present economic collapse over two decades ago, and who could say that he was wrong? That is what Towers do, i.e., collapse, whereas "the only solid reality is the word of God.'' Suffice it to say that the Big Three will not outlive the Trinity.
The fall of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. --Finnegans Wake
Here is what eventually happens to imaginary Towers and to the people who live in them: the thunderbolt: "he who builds a 'tower' to replace revelation from heaven by what he himself has fabricated, will be blasted by a thunderbolt, i.e., he will undergo the humiliation of being reduced to his own subjectivity and to terrestrial reality" -- i.e., back to the ground (which, of course, has two very different meanings; there is nothing wrong with humbly living on the ground, for that is where one will find the ground of being).
This is the thing I don't understand about scientism. Surely the scientific materialist knows up front that his knowledge is provisional and relative, and that it will eventually be brought low by the thunderbolt, even if it is only the thunderbolt of a new scientific development. And yet, they fall in love with their cognitive McTowers and cling to them as if they are holy writ.
This was the real dispute between Galileo and the Church, between relative vs. absolute truth (however awkwardly handled by the Church, which has been absurdly overblown anyway by radical secularists; it is indeed one of their "founding myths"). Does the earth really revolve around the sun? No, not at all. Only from a relative position. From the standpoint of later scientific developments (i.e., relativity), Galileo has been transcended, and the Church is still here.
Besides, the geocentric theory remains intrinsically true, if looked at vertically. That is, the human being is indeed the "center of the cosmos," in that only he recapitulates and embodies all the vertical degrees of creation within himself. The light of Truth is infinitely more central than sunlight. What could be more obvious?
If your little tower is not mercifully blasted by the thunderbolt in this life, then it will be severely blasted upon your demise. Evidently, that is when you will have the opportunity to bear witness to the full extent of your folly. You won't even have to be judged by God. Rather, you will judge yourself, like a child who transitions from, say, Piaget's stage of concrete operations to formal operations, and can objectively look back on his previous mode of cognition because he has transcended it. When you transcend, its as if you move out of the old drafty tower and into a real mansion.
I remember interviewing an unsophisticated Spanish-speaking patient a number of years ago. He was chronicling his various complaints, but didn't have the word for "impotence." He struggled to convey his meaning, and eventually confided that my manhood has fallen.
Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. --Finnegans Wake
But with the erection of manmade towers, the thunderbolt is a mercy, depending upon what one does with it. Think of it as an extreme form of (?!), for example, in the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. You might say that Saul the tower crumbled to the ground and became Paul the tree.
Much more to go. To be continued.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down --Eliot
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying --T.S. Eliot, What the Thunder Said
I think we're through with the Devil.
On to the Tower of Destruction. This is an extremely important card, so huddle up close to the screen and turn up the volume. It has to do with human evil, or "to evil which does not come from the outside, but which certainly has its origin within the human soul" -- not from the body, which is an innocent bystander in man's vertical fall. Depending upon how you look at it, the fall has to do either with willfulness or ignorance, which leads to "illicit" or illegitimate knowledge, and separates us from the Creator. Either way -- i.e., by way of intellect or will -- human beings are exiled from the vertical and plunged into the horizontal. Now, as UF explains, Genesis is set in a garden, which is a very different thing from a jungle -- which is completely wild -- or a desert -- which is more or less barren -- or a town -- which is a symbol of human invention, and where nothing grows spontaneously. (There is a pneumacosmic reason why the big cities are the main habitats of the Blue Meanies).
But a garden is what? It is a combination of vertical and horizontal energies, of planning and spontaneity. A beautiful garden, as the Frothy One can attest to, involves a harmonious combination of Spirit and Nature; of Spirit within nature, or Nature rising to Spirit. One thinks of Japanese gardens, which so transparently convey the supernatural within nature.
UF links this to the true mission and vocation of the Raccoon, which is "to cultivate and maintain the 'garden,' i.e. the world in a state of equilibrium and cooperation between Spirit and Nature" Coons are gardeners, not technicians (even if we do technical work). Unlike these modern excuses for gardeners, we do not merely "mow and blow." Rather, we cultivate and we maintain.
The Tower of Destruction symbolizes everything the garden is not. As UF explains, it comes about as a result of "the collective will of 'lower selves' to achieve the replacing of the 'true Self' of the celestial hierarchies and God with a superstructure of universal significance fabricated through the will." You could say that it's built prick by prick.
But the human will, alienated from spirit, cannot create anything of truly universal, or cosmic, significance. It can only create a tower, which is surely fated for the divine wrecking ball -- which is a mercy, never a punishment. For example, our scientistic jester is always kind or clueless enough to share his silly little towers with us, which we never fail to destroy at a glance. And yet, he still no doubt prefers to live amidst their haunted ruins.
For the Tower of Destruction teaches a law that is both general and universal, meaning that it "operates both on a small scale and on a grand scale, in individual biography as well as in that of mankind, and in the past, present and future equally." It is another one of those things in the Bible that didn't just happen once upon a time, but which happen every time. I read yesterday that the Pope had a prophecy of the present economic collapse over two decades ago, and who could say that he was wrong? That is what Towers do, i.e., collapse, whereas "the only solid reality is the word of God.'' Suffice it to say that the Big Three will not outlive the Trinity.
The fall of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. --Finnegans Wake
Here is what eventually happens to imaginary Towers and to the people who live in them: the thunderbolt: "he who builds a 'tower' to replace revelation from heaven by what he himself has fabricated, will be blasted by a thunderbolt, i.e., he will undergo the humiliation of being reduced to his own subjectivity and to terrestrial reality" -- i.e., back to the ground (which, of course, has two very different meanings; there is nothing wrong with humbly living on the ground, for that is where one will find the ground of being).
This is the thing I don't understand about scientism. Surely the scientific materialist knows up front that his knowledge is provisional and relative, and that it will eventually be brought low by the thunderbolt, even if it is only the thunderbolt of a new scientific development. And yet, they fall in love with their cognitive McTowers and cling to them as if they are holy writ.
This was the real dispute between Galileo and the Church, between relative vs. absolute truth (however awkwardly handled by the Church, which has been absurdly overblown anyway by radical secularists; it is indeed one of their "founding myths"). Does the earth really revolve around the sun? No, not at all. Only from a relative position. From the standpoint of later scientific developments (i.e., relativity), Galileo has been transcended, and the Church is still here.
Besides, the geocentric theory remains intrinsically true, if looked at vertically. That is, the human being is indeed the "center of the cosmos," in that only he recapitulates and embodies all the vertical degrees of creation within himself. The light of Truth is infinitely more central than sunlight. What could be more obvious?
If your little tower is not mercifully blasted by the thunderbolt in this life, then it will be severely blasted upon your demise. Evidently, that is when you will have the opportunity to bear witness to the full extent of your folly. You won't even have to be judged by God. Rather, you will judge yourself, like a child who transitions from, say, Piaget's stage of concrete operations to formal operations, and can objectively look back on his previous mode of cognition because he has transcended it. When you transcend, its as if you move out of the old drafty tower and into a real mansion.
I remember interviewing an unsophisticated Spanish-speaking patient a number of years ago. He was chronicling his various complaints, but didn't have the word for "impotence." He struggled to convey his meaning, and eventually confided that my manhood has fallen.
Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. --Finnegans Wake
But with the erection of manmade towers, the thunderbolt is a mercy, depending upon what one does with it. Think of it as an extreme form of (?!), for example, in the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. You might say that Saul the tower crumbled to the ground and became Paul the tree.
Much more to go. To be continued.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down --Eliot
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue States (12.05.11)
It is not just imagination + will that engenders demons; rather, it is intoxication of will and imagination that does so. As a result, they always go too far; they release inhibitions and partake of other forces that have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Again, this is something the left does by definition; since they deny the vertical, it returns in a disguised and perverse form, which provides them with a preternatural energy that conservatives can never match. The moment a conservative becomes "ecstatic" about politics, he's no longer a conservative. Intoxication certainly has its place. Just not in politics.
Obviously, young people are more prone to the varieties of psychic intoxication, so it is no surprise that Obama won the election because he took two thirds of the youth vote (the vote was 50-50 for actual adults). To paraphrase someone, these children wish to give us the full benefit of their inexperience.
I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like to me today if I were a 21 year old with a skull full of liberal mush.... Would I be susceptible to Obama intoxication? I don't know. I was a pretty cynical guy, but most cynics are just disappointed idealists, which I suppose I was. My first presidential vote went to Jimmy Carter, who, for those of you below a certain age, was the Obama of the time. He too promised dramatic change, which came in spades -- soaring inflation, increased unemployment, emboldened enemies, loss of respect in the world, diminished confidence at home. And yet, it didn't matter. I still voted for him again in 1980.
So was I drunk, or just stupid? I think mostly just the latter. You have no idea what it was like back then. There was literally no way to gain access to conservative arguments unless you were a National Review subscriber. There were a few conservative voices, but because they were so rare, you just assumed they were crazy, or eccentric at best, and probably evil. It was very much a cultural attitude, because you were basically trained to have a kind of visceral rejection of all things conservative, mainly because they tossed cold water on your intoxication. I am continually amazed that so many members of my auto-hypnotized generation are still completely swaddled in this retrograde cultural attitude....
I will continue this self-indulgent musing below, time permitting. For now, let's get back to The Devil.
UF points out that even Marx and Engels could have avoided intoxication -- and prevented the birth of a hideous genocidal demon -- if they had actually just considered the plight of the poor in a detached and disinterested way. But instead, they went far, far, over the line, into cloud cuckoo land, insisting that God did not exist, that history obeyed scientific laws, that "all ideology is only a superstructure on the basis of material interests," etc.
It is the same with the Darwinists. If they would just maintain a little sobriety, instead of drunkenly careening into areas in which they have nothing to contribute, all would be well. But like a drunken know-it-all at a cocktail party, they just can't stop themselves. They'll tell you everything about love, beauty, truth, God.... It's all wrong, of course, but that's the thing about being drunk -- it feels good.
I am once again reminded of Paul McCartney's first acid trip. His mind was so filled with ideas, that he had his assistant following him around, so he could dictate them to him. He remembered one particularly inspired idea, and insisted that his assistant take it down word for word, and then put it away for safe keeping. The next morning, they eagerly retrieved the scrap of paper, upon which it was written:
There are seven levels.
But it might as well have been: random mutation + adaption, or the workers are the means of production, or I think therefore I am, or abortion is protected by a Right to Privacy, or members of the same sex can "marry," or God is dead, or Hopeandchange.... None of these ideas "work" unless the person is intoxicated in some way. Sober up, and they're either banal or make no sense.
Of the founding fathers of the left, UF writes that "there is no doubt that with them it was a matter of an excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge -- which they did not in any way doubt, having been carried away by the intoxicating impulse of radicalism."
You must understand that the radical wants to be intoxicated -- with outrage, with self-righteous anger, with smugness, with superiority, with iconoclasm, with fear (e.g., of "domestic spying," or the "theofascistic takeover of the nation"), with "injustice." Like any other drug, radicalism is addictive because of the feelings it engenders. This, I think, explains why so many of my generation refuse to grow up -- because they are literlly addicted to the feelings produced by radicalism.
For example, they do not want racism to be over. For a white liberal, it gives such an intoxicating feeling of being on the side of righteousness, that it's impossible for them to let it go. For you Raccoons of color out there, you probably realize that every white liberal condescendingly imagines that he is noble Atticus Finch, and that you are poor helpless Tom Robinson. And I imagine that all the racial grievance hustlers -- if they aren't just outright sociopaths, like Al Sharpton -- imagine that white people give a lot of thought to race, when they actually couldn't care less (at least conservatives). Personally, I'd never think about race if liberals weren't obsessed with it.
By the way, a boneheaded -- and intoxicated -- commenter compared opposition to the redefinition of marriage to racism. But opposition to "gay marriage" isn't learned. Rather, it is innate. Anyone with a rightly ordered soul is naturally opposed to it. Rather, they have to unlearn what is natural and normal in order to be passionately pro-homosexual marriage.
I well remember being "homophobic" as a boy, but I was never racist. But this innocent homophobia wasn't learned. In fact, I had no idea what a homosexual was. Rather, it was just the innate knowledge that boys should act like boys -- that there was an ideal to which we should aspire. Boys who didn't were suspect. It was a kind of mutual self-policing, like fighting in the NHL.
In fact, it's a little perverse to even call it "homophobia." Rather, it was really just about learning The Art of Manliness, which all boys need to do -- especially today, when manliness is opposed on all sides by passive-aggressive liberal wimps for whom whining is a virtue. Marriage is one of the principle ways that boys become men. Therefore, it is no surprise that liberals want to undermine it.
That is the real agenda behind the intoxicated fury to redefine the institution. I think also that homosexuals imagine that "marrying" would allow them to "grow up," when that is hardly the problem. More often than not, homosexual behavior is specifically a rebellion against growing up, and all it implies. I don't have time to explain, but again, there is a lot of good information at NARTH for the bi-curious.
In contrast, racism must be learned. Yes, I know it is ubiquitous, but it is nevertheless learned. It is really about cultural difference, and race is simply a handy marker for this. In the case of my son, for example, his best friends are a Japanese boy (I mean real Japanese -- he doesn't speak English); two children of a black and white couple; an adopted black child of a white couple; and a child of a white and asian couple. Plus, his mother is a Jewish-Catholic, his father a Vedanta-Christian. He has never mentioned anything pertaining to race, and I don't imagine he ever will unless we teach him that it is somehow important. Being that he won't be attending a public school, he'll be shielded from the racial obsessions of the left, at least for awhile. He will have to learn that race is somehow important, which I imagine will be increasingly difficult, since Obama will be the first president of whom he is consciously aware.
The left also doesn't want poverty to end, because this too would eliminate the cause of their righteous indignation. Otherwise they would define poverty in absolute instead of relative terms. So long as they define it in relative terms, a certain fixed percentage of the population will always be "poor," no matter how fat and affluent. (On his program yesterday, Dennis Prager had an economist who explained this in an extremely lucid and sober manner; can't think of his name.)
Back to the card. Any form of radicalism is given force and momentum by the intoxicated desire to "change everything utterly at a single stroke. And it is this fever to *change* everything utterly at a single stroke which gave birth to the demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and material interest being placed above all else, which is now making the rounds in the world."
You see how it works? The ideology legitimizes the intoxicated expression of envy, anger, murder, whatever. It is what allowed Bill Ayers, for example, to want to attempt mass murder in good conscience. When you're full of that much righteous rage, what else can you do? He still has no regrets, because he is still drunk. But like all drunks, he stays drunk in order to avoid the pain of regret -- regret for a wasted life spent wasted on ideology.
Again, this is the counter-inspiration of the Devil, and it is a caricature of spiritual grace and transformation, for as one descends down into the inconscient (↓), something rises up to meet you (↑), which produces the intoxication and gives birth to a third thing.
Whoops. Out of time. To be continued....
Again, this is something the left does by definition; since they deny the vertical, it returns in a disguised and perverse form, which provides them with a preternatural energy that conservatives can never match. The moment a conservative becomes "ecstatic" about politics, he's no longer a conservative. Intoxication certainly has its place. Just not in politics.
Obviously, young people are more prone to the varieties of psychic intoxication, so it is no surprise that Obama won the election because he took two thirds of the youth vote (the vote was 50-50 for actual adults). To paraphrase someone, these children wish to give us the full benefit of their inexperience.
I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like to me today if I were a 21 year old with a skull full of liberal mush.... Would I be susceptible to Obama intoxication? I don't know. I was a pretty cynical guy, but most cynics are just disappointed idealists, which I suppose I was. My first presidential vote went to Jimmy Carter, who, for those of you below a certain age, was the Obama of the time. He too promised dramatic change, which came in spades -- soaring inflation, increased unemployment, emboldened enemies, loss of respect in the world, diminished confidence at home. And yet, it didn't matter. I still voted for him again in 1980.
So was I drunk, or just stupid? I think mostly just the latter. You have no idea what it was like back then. There was literally no way to gain access to conservative arguments unless you were a National Review subscriber. There were a few conservative voices, but because they were so rare, you just assumed they were crazy, or eccentric at best, and probably evil. It was very much a cultural attitude, because you were basically trained to have a kind of visceral rejection of all things conservative, mainly because they tossed cold water on your intoxication. I am continually amazed that so many members of my auto-hypnotized generation are still completely swaddled in this retrograde cultural attitude....
I will continue this self-indulgent musing below, time permitting. For now, let's get back to The Devil.
UF points out that even Marx and Engels could have avoided intoxication -- and prevented the birth of a hideous genocidal demon -- if they had actually just considered the plight of the poor in a detached and disinterested way. But instead, they went far, far, over the line, into cloud cuckoo land, insisting that God did not exist, that history obeyed scientific laws, that "all ideology is only a superstructure on the basis of material interests," etc.
It is the same with the Darwinists. If they would just maintain a little sobriety, instead of drunkenly careening into areas in which they have nothing to contribute, all would be well. But like a drunken know-it-all at a cocktail party, they just can't stop themselves. They'll tell you everything about love, beauty, truth, God.... It's all wrong, of course, but that's the thing about being drunk -- it feels good.
I am once again reminded of Paul McCartney's first acid trip. His mind was so filled with ideas, that he had his assistant following him around, so he could dictate them to him. He remembered one particularly inspired idea, and insisted that his assistant take it down word for word, and then put it away for safe keeping. The next morning, they eagerly retrieved the scrap of paper, upon which it was written:
There are seven levels.
But it might as well have been: random mutation + adaption, or the workers are the means of production, or I think therefore I am, or abortion is protected by a Right to Privacy, or members of the same sex can "marry," or God is dead, or Hopeandchange.... None of these ideas "work" unless the person is intoxicated in some way. Sober up, and they're either banal or make no sense.
Of the founding fathers of the left, UF writes that "there is no doubt that with them it was a matter of an excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge -- which they did not in any way doubt, having been carried away by the intoxicating impulse of radicalism."
You must understand that the radical wants to be intoxicated -- with outrage, with self-righteous anger, with smugness, with superiority, with iconoclasm, with fear (e.g., of "domestic spying," or the "theofascistic takeover of the nation"), with "injustice." Like any other drug, radicalism is addictive because of the feelings it engenders. This, I think, explains why so many of my generation refuse to grow up -- because they are literlly addicted to the feelings produced by radicalism.
For example, they do not want racism to be over. For a white liberal, it gives such an intoxicating feeling of being on the side of righteousness, that it's impossible for them to let it go. For you Raccoons of color out there, you probably realize that every white liberal condescendingly imagines that he is noble Atticus Finch, and that you are poor helpless Tom Robinson. And I imagine that all the racial grievance hustlers -- if they aren't just outright sociopaths, like Al Sharpton -- imagine that white people give a lot of thought to race, when they actually couldn't care less (at least conservatives). Personally, I'd never think about race if liberals weren't obsessed with it.
By the way, a boneheaded -- and intoxicated -- commenter compared opposition to the redefinition of marriage to racism. But opposition to "gay marriage" isn't learned. Rather, it is innate. Anyone with a rightly ordered soul is naturally opposed to it. Rather, they have to unlearn what is natural and normal in order to be passionately pro-homosexual marriage.
I well remember being "homophobic" as a boy, but I was never racist. But this innocent homophobia wasn't learned. In fact, I had no idea what a homosexual was. Rather, it was just the innate knowledge that boys should act like boys -- that there was an ideal to which we should aspire. Boys who didn't were suspect. It was a kind of mutual self-policing, like fighting in the NHL.
In fact, it's a little perverse to even call it "homophobia." Rather, it was really just about learning The Art of Manliness, which all boys need to do -- especially today, when manliness is opposed on all sides by passive-aggressive liberal wimps for whom whining is a virtue. Marriage is one of the principle ways that boys become men. Therefore, it is no surprise that liberals want to undermine it.
That is the real agenda behind the intoxicated fury to redefine the institution. I think also that homosexuals imagine that "marrying" would allow them to "grow up," when that is hardly the problem. More often than not, homosexual behavior is specifically a rebellion against growing up, and all it implies. I don't have time to explain, but again, there is a lot of good information at NARTH for the bi-curious.
In contrast, racism must be learned. Yes, I know it is ubiquitous, but it is nevertheless learned. It is really about cultural difference, and race is simply a handy marker for this. In the case of my son, for example, his best friends are a Japanese boy (I mean real Japanese -- he doesn't speak English); two children of a black and white couple; an adopted black child of a white couple; and a child of a white and asian couple. Plus, his mother is a Jewish-Catholic, his father a Vedanta-Christian. He has never mentioned anything pertaining to race, and I don't imagine he ever will unless we teach him that it is somehow important. Being that he won't be attending a public school, he'll be shielded from the racial obsessions of the left, at least for awhile. He will have to learn that race is somehow important, which I imagine will be increasingly difficult, since Obama will be the first president of whom he is consciously aware.
The left also doesn't want poverty to end, because this too would eliminate the cause of their righteous indignation. Otherwise they would define poverty in absolute instead of relative terms. So long as they define it in relative terms, a certain fixed percentage of the population will always be "poor," no matter how fat and affluent. (On his program yesterday, Dennis Prager had an economist who explained this in an extremely lucid and sober manner; can't think of his name.)
Back to the card. Any form of radicalism is given force and momentum by the intoxicated desire to "change everything utterly at a single stroke. And it is this fever to *change* everything utterly at a single stroke which gave birth to the demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and material interest being placed above all else, which is now making the rounds in the world."
You see how it works? The ideology legitimizes the intoxicated expression of envy, anger, murder, whatever. It is what allowed Bill Ayers, for example, to want to attempt mass murder in good conscience. When you're full of that much righteous rage, what else can you do? He still has no regrets, because he is still drunk. But like all drunks, he stays drunk in order to avoid the pain of regret -- regret for a wasted life spent wasted on ideology.
Again, this is the counter-inspiration of the Devil, and it is a caricature of spiritual grace and transformation, for as one descends down into the inconscient (↓), something rises up to meet you (↑), which produces the intoxication and gives birth to a third thing.
Whoops. Out of time. To be continued....
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Absolute Lies and Infinite Nonsense (12.02.11)
Of the generation of demons, UF writes that they are a result of the cooperation of the male and female principles, or perverse will and imagination: "a desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon."
If you look at the card,
you can see that the demon is much larger than its parents, "who have become enslaved by their own creation. They represent perverse will and imagination contrary to nature, which have given birth to an androgynous demon, i.e., to a being endowed with desire and imagination, which dominates the forces that engendered it."
Several observations are in order. From 2 Corinthians we know that the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. In other words, the Creator specifically creates man with a spirit of freedom, which you might say is the means to the end of our being, which is theosis, perfection, or God-realization.
Being that we are in the image of the Creator, human beings have no choice but to create. But what shall we create? More importantly, in what spirit shall we do so? Genuine creation should be liberating, expansive, elevating, radiating. But demonic creation will be the opposite: enslaving, constricting, enclosing, debasing. It always makes us smaller, not larger.
I remember awhile back, Pope Benedict made a comment to the effect that rock music was narcissistic and "enclosing." I can't find the exact quote, but I knew exactly what he was referring to, as it is something I became aware of when rock & roll morphed into rock music at some point after 1968. You cannot compare the joyous and uplifting feelings that accompanied Beatlemania with the real darkness that was unleashed later.
I did find this comment by the Pope: "Rock [music] is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe." True as far as it goes, but there is nevertheless rock music that is liberating in an upward way, but much more that only liberates downward, and therefore enslaves.
I am also reminded of Schuon's metaphysics, in which male is a reflection of the Absolute, female a reflection of the Infinite. Perhaps the most destructive force on earth is the absolute will detached from the divine plane. This leads to the will to power and the absolute dictator, and to a cult that is always excessively male (one thinks of the homoeroticism of the Nazis).
On the other hand, the perverse imagination is well reflected in contemporary art and academia. For example, deconstruction is nothing more than a sick and mercurial female whose reality depends upon the mood she is in. There is no fixed, i.e., Absolute, meaning, since the Infinite has become divorced from him: as the cliche goes, "the Infinite needs the Absolute like a fish needs a bicycle." But once you detach language from the Logos, or Law of the Father, it becomes a kind of infinite nonsense generator -- the "infinite blather" of the tenured.
On the other end, once you detach the Absolute from the Infinite, it becomes a kind of soul-crushing ideology to which one must assent, as in 1984. It reminds us of Queeg and his jihad against conservatism, which is specifically a harmonious marriage of Absolute (or transcendence) and Infinite (or immanence).
Here is the irony: Queeg wishes to elevate Darwinian fundamentalism to the status of Absolute, which has the specific effect of denying the infinitude of Man's spirit. The result -- if you are intelligent enough to draw out the implications -- is that both science and Man become strictly impossible, in that they are detached from their very ground.
Which reminds us: please let your voice be heard and vote for Queeg for Biggest Pro-Censorship Ass-Hat (again, his flagrant ass-hattery results from his demonic worship of a false absolute, which he must brittlely defend by excommunicating anyone who recognizes the actual Absolute). And while you're at it, feel free to vote for Bob for Best Religious Blog, but only if you believe that he most adequately reflects the Absolute and Infinite, or divine will and creative imagination, in his scribblings.
Because that is what he is always attempting to do. Again, he looks upon religious truth as an extremely fruitful set of metamusical chords with which we are called upon to creatively improvise over, or riff upon, a la jazz. Think, for example, of the "fixed canon" of popular music, the "Great American Songbook" -- composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rogers & Hart, Johnny Mercer, et al. While I Got Rhythm is, on the one hand, an "absolute standard," the jazz musician employs his "infinite musical imagination" to play with it, so that it never comes out the same way twice, despite being absolute. Do you understand what I am saying? For this is also how you make religion truly "come alive."
This is why I believe that the Way of the Raccoon could really be the savior of religion, so to speak, but how many people appreciate jazz anymore? Besides, it is a difficult practice to combine the elements of extreme discipline and radical freedom. But only the disciplined are really free anyway. Might as well take it to the limit, which is the gateway to the limitless.
Back to MOTT. UF next discusses the origins of the left in the false absolute of Marxism: "Engendered by the will of the masses through the generations, armed with a dummy intellectuality which is Hegel's dialectic misconstrued -- this spectre has grown and continues to make the rounds in Europe and in other continents..."
Here is where Marxism and Queegism converge, for with the former "there is no God or gods -- there are only 'demons' in the sense of creations of the human will and imagination." In other words, "Marxism" is simply an ideological superstructure produced by the will of the masses, which is in turn rooted in material economics and nothing more. Likewise, for the Darwnian fundamentalist, everything ultimately boils down to the selfish gene, or an absurdly absolute denial of the Infinite.
This creation of a false absolute is idol worship, pure and simple. But again, although we have created the idol, it has power over us, and we can't seem to get rid of it. Look at the way government grows, no matter who is in power. But that's how demons work -- again, refer to the picture above. The two little people are slaves of the government they created.
I see that al Qaeda just referred to Obama as a "house slave." That's the thing liberals don't understand about genocide. Let it go on long enough, and it eventually leads to hate speech. But the statement is true in a way unintended by al Qaeda, since we're all slaves in the house of this leviathan master we've created.
[W]hat terrible power resides in our will and imagination, and what responsibility it entails for those who unleash it into the world!... We people of the twentieth century know that the "great pests" of our time are the [artificially engendered demons], which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages. --MOTT
If you look at the card,
you can see that the demon is much larger than its parents, "who have become enslaved by their own creation. They represent perverse will and imagination contrary to nature, which have given birth to an androgynous demon, i.e., to a being endowed with desire and imagination, which dominates the forces that engendered it." Several observations are in order. From 2 Corinthians we know that the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. In other words, the Creator specifically creates man with a spirit of freedom, which you might say is the means to the end of our being, which is theosis, perfection, or God-realization.
Being that we are in the image of the Creator, human beings have no choice but to create. But what shall we create? More importantly, in what spirit shall we do so? Genuine creation should be liberating, expansive, elevating, radiating. But demonic creation will be the opposite: enslaving, constricting, enclosing, debasing. It always makes us smaller, not larger.
I remember awhile back, Pope Benedict made a comment to the effect that rock music was narcissistic and "enclosing." I can't find the exact quote, but I knew exactly what he was referring to, as it is something I became aware of when rock & roll morphed into rock music at some point after 1968. You cannot compare the joyous and uplifting feelings that accompanied Beatlemania with the real darkness that was unleashed later.
I did find this comment by the Pope: "Rock [music] is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe." True as far as it goes, but there is nevertheless rock music that is liberating in an upward way, but much more that only liberates downward, and therefore enslaves.
I am also reminded of Schuon's metaphysics, in which male is a reflection of the Absolute, female a reflection of the Infinite. Perhaps the most destructive force on earth is the absolute will detached from the divine plane. This leads to the will to power and the absolute dictator, and to a cult that is always excessively male (one thinks of the homoeroticism of the Nazis).
On the other hand, the perverse imagination is well reflected in contemporary art and academia. For example, deconstruction is nothing more than a sick and mercurial female whose reality depends upon the mood she is in. There is no fixed, i.e., Absolute, meaning, since the Infinite has become divorced from him: as the cliche goes, "the Infinite needs the Absolute like a fish needs a bicycle." But once you detach language from the Logos, or Law of the Father, it becomes a kind of infinite nonsense generator -- the "infinite blather" of the tenured.
On the other end, once you detach the Absolute from the Infinite, it becomes a kind of soul-crushing ideology to which one must assent, as in 1984. It reminds us of Queeg and his jihad against conservatism, which is specifically a harmonious marriage of Absolute (or transcendence) and Infinite (or immanence).
Here is the irony: Queeg wishes to elevate Darwinian fundamentalism to the status of Absolute, which has the specific effect of denying the infinitude of Man's spirit. The result -- if you are intelligent enough to draw out the implications -- is that both science and Man become strictly impossible, in that they are detached from their very ground.
Which reminds us: please let your voice be heard and vote for Queeg for Biggest Pro-Censorship Ass-Hat (again, his flagrant ass-hattery results from his demonic worship of a false absolute, which he must brittlely defend by excommunicating anyone who recognizes the actual Absolute). And while you're at it, feel free to vote for Bob for Best Religious Blog, but only if you believe that he most adequately reflects the Absolute and Infinite, or divine will and creative imagination, in his scribblings.
Because that is what he is always attempting to do. Again, he looks upon religious truth as an extremely fruitful set of metamusical chords with which we are called upon to creatively improvise over, or riff upon, a la jazz. Think, for example, of the "fixed canon" of popular music, the "Great American Songbook" -- composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rogers & Hart, Johnny Mercer, et al. While I Got Rhythm is, on the one hand, an "absolute standard," the jazz musician employs his "infinite musical imagination" to play with it, so that it never comes out the same way twice, despite being absolute. Do you understand what I am saying? For this is also how you make religion truly "come alive."
This is why I believe that the Way of the Raccoon could really be the savior of religion, so to speak, but how many people appreciate jazz anymore? Besides, it is a difficult practice to combine the elements of extreme discipline and radical freedom. But only the disciplined are really free anyway. Might as well take it to the limit, which is the gateway to the limitless.
Back to MOTT. UF next discusses the origins of the left in the false absolute of Marxism: "Engendered by the will of the masses through the generations, armed with a dummy intellectuality which is Hegel's dialectic misconstrued -- this spectre has grown and continues to make the rounds in Europe and in other continents..."
Here is where Marxism and Queegism converge, for with the former "there is no God or gods -- there are only 'demons' in the sense of creations of the human will and imagination." In other words, "Marxism" is simply an ideological superstructure produced by the will of the masses, which is in turn rooted in material economics and nothing more. Likewise, for the Darwnian fundamentalist, everything ultimately boils down to the selfish gene, or an absurdly absolute denial of the Infinite.
This creation of a false absolute is idol worship, pure and simple. But again, although we have created the idol, it has power over us, and we can't seem to get rid of it. Look at the way government grows, no matter who is in power. But that's how demons work -- again, refer to the picture above. The two little people are slaves of the government they created.
I see that al Qaeda just referred to Obama as a "house slave." That's the thing liberals don't understand about genocide. Let it go on long enough, and it eventually leads to hate speech. But the statement is true in a way unintended by al Qaeda, since we're all slaves in the house of this leviathan master we've created.
[W]hat terrible power resides in our will and imagination, and what responsibility it entails for those who unleash it into the world!... We people of the twentieth century know that the "great pests" of our time are the [artificially engendered demons], which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages. --MOTT
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
How to Create Your Very Own Demon (12.01.11)
There can be entire communities that revolve around collectively generated demons. I find it interesting that one of the early themes of the Bible has to do with the Creator's effort to get folks to stop worshipping these damn mind parasites. As UF explains, "the Canaan Moloch who demanded the bloody sacrifice of the first born, mentioned so often in the Bible," was "a demon created artificially" by the human collective.
As I mentioned in my book -- which has now been in the amazon top two million for 93 consecutive weeks -- when we encounter collective beliefs and practices that appear insane and self-defeating, we are probably dealing with mind parasites. While they don't appear adaptive, they actually are. It's just that they are adaptive to the internal, not external, world. This is no different than a neurotic patient with a baffling symptom. Ultimately the symptom can be traced back to some earlier adaptation.
The most difficult challenge for human beings is to adapt to the problem of having a mind. Ultimately, mind parasites come down to the problem of thoughts and what to do with them -- anxious thoughts, fearful thoughts, envious thoughts, greedy thoughts, angry thoughts, sexual thoughts, etc. One of the primary purposes of culture is to collectively manage these primitive thoughts.
In the course of writing my own book, one of the better works I found on the topic of lethal mind parasites was In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. It's probably been over a decade since I read it, so I can't give it an unqualified recommendation. Here's what it says on the inside flap:
"In ancient times, humans projected their hostility into their gods; 'bloodthirsty' gods who 'demanded' the sacrifice of children. In the Shadow of Moloch begins with pre-biblical times by examining Moloch, the god of the 'Children of Ammon' who demanded the burning of children. Tracing the legacy of child sacrifice, Bergmann shows that the greatest efforts to overcome this ritual can found in biblical accounts of the suspended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham and of the sacrifice of Christ by God the Father to atone for original sin. He argues that the development of Judaism and Christianity can be seen as an effort, only partially successful, to ameliorate past aggression of child sacrifice through the creation of an entirely loving god."
I would say discovery of an entirely loving God, but you get the point, because there is no evolutionary reason to believe that human beings could have "invented" such a being, given their dismal track record. Obviously, the systematic murder of one's children poses a challenge to natural selection, unless there is some deeper mechanism to account for it. Again, I believe that mechanism is the urgent need to adapt to the catastrophic condition of having a self-conscious mind.
It is difficult for us to imagine how catastrophic that was -- to have been, as Richard Prior so poetically put it, the first motherf*cker to look around and ask himself what in the f*ck is goin' on?! Then again, not really, if you can empathize with the emotionally catastrophic conditions of infancy -- which, sad to say, many, if not most, parents still cannot do. I would estimate -- actually, studies on maternal attachment estimate -- that perhaps only a third of parents in the West are able to do this. In more primitive locales, such as in the Islamic world -- well, fuggedaboudit. Child sacrifice goes on unabated. They just call it intifada instead of infanticide.
And in the West, we simply have more subtle means of engaging in child sacrifice. We don't kill the body, but murder the soul. I mean, I literally cannot imagine sending my son to a California public school, because I would in effect be sending him off to be sacrificed to the leftist collective.
I could not bear doing to him what was done to me -- back when the leftist takeover of the educational system wasn't nearly as complete as today. He would have to internalize all of their strange gods -- multiculturalism, moral relativism, materialism, scientism, environmentalism, etc. -- and in so doing, die to his own -- God's own -- soul. I could no more do that than I could have sent him out to a nursemaid moments after his birth -- which is what most well-to-do people once did in the West. Why did they do that? Because they could not tolerate their own internal infant and therefore not tolerate their external infant. Likewise, if you do not know your own soul, you cannot protect and nurture your child's soul.
In fact, continuing with Bergmann's flap, I think it is a truism that "the psychological conflict of child sacrifice still haunts the unconscious of modern men and women." He posits a "Laius complex -- hostility of the father toward the son -- to explain sacrifice. He discloses that, in psychological terms, the development of Western religions is an effort by insufficiently loved men and women to change their inner balance away from hostility, toward a more loving center."
The only problem with the book is that it takes a purely psychoanalytic approach, and is therefore reductionistic. But you can take the same ideas and place them in a more expansive religious metaphysical framework, which is what I attempted to do in my book.
I'm at a crossroads here... continue with Bergmann, or return to MOTT? I'd better stick with the latter, or we'll never finish.
Regarding the collective mind parasites, you can see that UF is really not far from Bergmann: although "engendered subjectively," these artificial demons "become forces independent of the subjective consciousness that engendered them. They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness" (again, think of the image in the card of the man and woman chained to a larger entity that they have co-created).
UF compares these collective demons to psychological complexes, which is why it is something of a truism to say that a culture is a public neurosis, while a neurosis is a private culture. But there are also public psychoses, e.g., the community of dailykos or the viewership of Keith Olbermann.
Yes, they are very frightening to think about, because they really do believe those things. But it's not so much "the things they believe," i.e., the contained (♂), as the container (♀) -- i.e., the very space in which they live -- that is so disturbing. Again, think of that deeply irrational container as a sort of desperate effort to contain their own unbearable proto-thoughts and impulses. You could say that the kos kids and Olberchildren are pathological products of an insane pairing of ♂ and ♀. Leftism is what happens when you put together an abandoning ♀ and a homicidal ♂: uncontainable and incoherent.... yucktoplasm leaking all over the place.
You could also say that these demons represent the premature birth of the unborn due to an inability to tolerate reality and allow the thoughts to "gestate" in the womb of being. In other words, they represent premature closure of the psychic field, which is again one of the main reasons why people believe such weird things.
These weird ideas nevertheless have to be "nourished" by the psychic life of the parent, which is why intellectuals devote their lives to feeding and propping up their craziness -- e.g., Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thousands more. Their body of work is a kind of pathological psychic body that is completely detached from reality. When they die, it will "live on" in followers who have been infected by these ghostly and ghastly ideas. Think of "patient zero," Marx, who is still spreading his spiritually fatal infection. Religion -- properly understood -- inoculates one from the infection, but that's the subject for a different post.
Suddenly I am out of time. To be continued.....
As I mentioned in my book -- which has now been in the amazon top two million for 93 consecutive weeks -- when we encounter collective beliefs and practices that appear insane and self-defeating, we are probably dealing with mind parasites. While they don't appear adaptive, they actually are. It's just that they are adaptive to the internal, not external, world. This is no different than a neurotic patient with a baffling symptom. Ultimately the symptom can be traced back to some earlier adaptation.
The most difficult challenge for human beings is to adapt to the problem of having a mind. Ultimately, mind parasites come down to the problem of thoughts and what to do with them -- anxious thoughts, fearful thoughts, envious thoughts, greedy thoughts, angry thoughts, sexual thoughts, etc. One of the primary purposes of culture is to collectively manage these primitive thoughts.
In the course of writing my own book, one of the better works I found on the topic of lethal mind parasites was In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. It's probably been over a decade since I read it, so I can't give it an unqualified recommendation. Here's what it says on the inside flap:
"In ancient times, humans projected their hostility into their gods; 'bloodthirsty' gods who 'demanded' the sacrifice of children. In the Shadow of Moloch begins with pre-biblical times by examining Moloch, the god of the 'Children of Ammon' who demanded the burning of children. Tracing the legacy of child sacrifice, Bergmann shows that the greatest efforts to overcome this ritual can found in biblical accounts of the suspended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham and of the sacrifice of Christ by God the Father to atone for original sin. He argues that the development of Judaism and Christianity can be seen as an effort, only partially successful, to ameliorate past aggression of child sacrifice through the creation of an entirely loving god."
I would say discovery of an entirely loving God, but you get the point, because there is no evolutionary reason to believe that human beings could have "invented" such a being, given their dismal track record. Obviously, the systematic murder of one's children poses a challenge to natural selection, unless there is some deeper mechanism to account for it. Again, I believe that mechanism is the urgent need to adapt to the catastrophic condition of having a self-conscious mind.
It is difficult for us to imagine how catastrophic that was -- to have been, as Richard Prior so poetically put it, the first motherf*cker to look around and ask himself what in the f*ck is goin' on?! Then again, not really, if you can empathize with the emotionally catastrophic conditions of infancy -- which, sad to say, many, if not most, parents still cannot do. I would estimate -- actually, studies on maternal attachment estimate -- that perhaps only a third of parents in the West are able to do this. In more primitive locales, such as in the Islamic world -- well, fuggedaboudit. Child sacrifice goes on unabated. They just call it intifada instead of infanticide.
And in the West, we simply have more subtle means of engaging in child sacrifice. We don't kill the body, but murder the soul. I mean, I literally cannot imagine sending my son to a California public school, because I would in effect be sending him off to be sacrificed to the leftist collective.
I could not bear doing to him what was done to me -- back when the leftist takeover of the educational system wasn't nearly as complete as today. He would have to internalize all of their strange gods -- multiculturalism, moral relativism, materialism, scientism, environmentalism, etc. -- and in so doing, die to his own -- God's own -- soul. I could no more do that than I could have sent him out to a nursemaid moments after his birth -- which is what most well-to-do people once did in the West. Why did they do that? Because they could not tolerate their own internal infant and therefore not tolerate their external infant. Likewise, if you do not know your own soul, you cannot protect and nurture your child's soul.
In fact, continuing with Bergmann's flap, I think it is a truism that "the psychological conflict of child sacrifice still haunts the unconscious of modern men and women." He posits a "Laius complex -- hostility of the father toward the son -- to explain sacrifice. He discloses that, in psychological terms, the development of Western religions is an effort by insufficiently loved men and women to change their inner balance away from hostility, toward a more loving center."
The only problem with the book is that it takes a purely psychoanalytic approach, and is therefore reductionistic. But you can take the same ideas and place them in a more expansive religious metaphysical framework, which is what I attempted to do in my book.
I'm at a crossroads here... continue with Bergmann, or return to MOTT? I'd better stick with the latter, or we'll never finish.
Regarding the collective mind parasites, you can see that UF is really not far from Bergmann: although "engendered subjectively," these artificial demons "become forces independent of the subjective consciousness that engendered them. They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness" (again, think of the image in the card of the man and woman chained to a larger entity that they have co-created).
UF compares these collective demons to psychological complexes, which is why it is something of a truism to say that a culture is a public neurosis, while a neurosis is a private culture. But there are also public psychoses, e.g., the community of dailykos or the viewership of Keith Olbermann.
Yes, they are very frightening to think about, because they really do believe those things. But it's not so much "the things they believe," i.e., the contained (♂), as the container (♀) -- i.e., the very space in which they live -- that is so disturbing. Again, think of that deeply irrational container as a sort of desperate effort to contain their own unbearable proto-thoughts and impulses. You could say that the kos kids and Olberchildren are pathological products of an insane pairing of ♂ and ♀. Leftism is what happens when you put together an abandoning ♀ and a homicidal ♂: uncontainable and incoherent.... yucktoplasm leaking all over the place.
You could also say that these demons represent the premature birth of the unborn due to an inability to tolerate reality and allow the thoughts to "gestate" in the womb of being. In other words, they represent premature closure of the psychic field, which is again one of the main reasons why people believe such weird things.
These weird ideas nevertheless have to be "nourished" by the psychic life of the parent, which is why intellectuals devote their lives to feeding and propping up their craziness -- e.g., Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thousands more. Their body of work is a kind of pathological psychic body that is completely detached from reality. When they die, it will "live on" in followers who have been infected by these ghostly and ghastly ideas. Think of "patient zero," Marx, who is still spreading his spiritually fatal infection. Religion -- properly understood -- inoculates one from the infection, but that's the subject for a different post.
Suddenly I am out of time. To be continued.....
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Devil and His Chaotic Minions (11.30.11)
This ought to be juicy: the Devil. In a way, he embodies the counter-movement of all the cosmic principles we've been discussing up to this point. Indeed, this is the aracunum of counter-inspiration, which, interestingly, is not "expiration." In other words, as we've been saying in so many ways, genuine mysticism, gnosis, and magic come about as a result of the harmonious union of (↑) and (↓), while counter-inspiration would have to be some sort of caricature or counterfeit version of this -- a kind of bad breath, or hellitosis.
As vision and inspiration involve tears and sweat, this card introduces us "to the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration" (MOTT). What? Yes. I didn't want to go there, but a fine example of the electrical intoxication would be the infamous Obama-tingle in Chris Matthews' pasty thigh.
I like this card, because it is also the card of the Mind Parasites. These are the self-generated demons which then have power over those who create them -- which you will no doubt notice represents a kind of pathological cycle of (↑) and (↓); more on which below.
But first, UF makes an extremely important point, that "the world of evil is a chaotic world." Which means, if you wish to create a world in which the Devil has a "free hand," so to speak, you needn't necessarily engage in evil per se. Rather, all you have to do is disrupt the celestial order and sow chaos below. (I actually prefer the word "disorder," since chaos now has a scientific meaning; from the perspective of chaos theory, processes that look chaotic may exhibit extremely deep order, but that's the topic for another post. We'll just stick with "chaos" in its colloquial sense.)
A most obvious example of cosmic order is the distinction between male and female. To blend these categories is not just foolish and unwise, but evil. Or, soon enough, it will lead to evil. I don't want to get sidetracked, but here is a depressing article by Kay Hymowitz on the contemporary state of male-female relations, Love in the Time of Darwinism. The take-away point is that the chaos engendered by feminism and other postmodern idiolatries has hardly been "liberating." Rather, in taking a wrecking ball to the nonlocal celestial hierarchy, it has "ironically" reduced human beings to a state of pure animality in their mating habits. Ladies, be careful what you whine for.
In turn, this is why the homosexual activists clamoring for the redefinition of marriage are promoting evil, pure and simple. One has to be so willfully obtuse to suggest that I am saying that this or that homosexual is evil. That's an entirely different subject. Rather, what I am saying is that I do not want a handful of judges to impose their diabolical values on the rest of us, just because they do not understand that marriage exists as a divine archetype, and that it is not for us to tamper with, any more than it is up to a judge to tamper with the laws of physics. You cannot turn my aunt into a Maserati by judicial Fiat.
One hears other boneheads saying things such as: " duh, gay marriage won't hurt my marriage. What are these conservatives afraid of?" As Dennis Prager always says, we live in the "age of stupidity," and this is about as clear an example as one could imagine. What Prager means is that we live in an age that is devoid of wisdom -- in particular, the accumulated wisdom of the centuries -- which, on a spiritual level, is no less important then the "biological wisdom" embodied in our genes.
And why do we live in an age of stupidity? Because liberals have spent the last fifty years undermining the legitimacy of the divine-human order, and therefore sowing chaos. And once you have chaos, then you have successfully destroyed any standards by which we may objectively guide our lives.
This is what I mean when I try to tell these uncomprehending "integralists" that the left is not the complement of conservative liberalism, but its very negation. A true political complementarity would nevertheless have to share the same first principles, which was more or less the case in America until the 1960s. Today, the problem is not that we differ with the left over this or that policy issue. Rather, they have entirely different first principles, principles which are not rooted in the Constitution, in American tradition, and certainly not in transcendent reality (i.e., the vertical).
So, if you think that article by Hymowitz is depressing, just wait until we've had "homosexual marriage" for a generation or two. When I say that civilization cannot survive the metaphysical chaos this will enshrine, I am not being polemical. I mean it quite literally and dispassionately. This is what happens when human sexuality is reduced to a purely horizontal category.
Even leaving spirituality to the side, the activists express such an astonishing naivete about the power of human sexuality, that it is not even childlike, because children are well aware of such fundamental categories as Father and Mother. Only a leftist could be so stupid as to deny such a primordial reality and call it "progress." As a libertarian, I do not believe it is the business of the state to tell a couple of men or women what sort of erotic partnership they wish to have. Just don't pretend that it is marriage, which it can never, ever be.
Notice that their only possible counter-argument will be a strictly horizontal one, thereby denying the very context of marriage, i.e., the sacred. By the nature of their arguments, one can tell that they have no idea what marriage actually is, in that they see it only in terms of an arbitrary "right" which some people supposedly have but others don't.
Again, it is an entirely horizontal argument. Marriage, like human freedom itself, exists prior to the state. "Homosexual marriage" can only exist if the state imposes a new definition of marriage, thereby destroying it. Yes, yes, Britney Spears or Pamela Anderson also make a mockery of marriage. That is not a counter-argument. Rather, that is the point, idiot.
Anyway, the main point is that if you want to engender evil, all you have to do is promote disorder by denying or blending categories which must remain separate in order for there to be civilization at all. This is why the Creator's very first act is one of separation amidst chaos. Note as well that the homosexual activist will accuse me of being evil because of my deference to the divine order (by which evil is measured to begin with). Is this not diabolical? No, that wasn't a rhetorical question, because while the luciferian is that which opposes the divine reality, the diabolical is that which actively undermines it. Look at how they are attempting to destroy the Boy Scouts for similar reasons.
Back to the card. UF notes that it evokes the idea of slavery, in that it depicts two people "who are attached to the pedestal of a monstrous demon." It suggests "an eminently practical lesson as to how it happens that beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it." (If you look closely, you will see that it is actually Mayor Newsom presiding over a gay wedding.)
With regard to these parasitic entities, the analogy with biology is apt, for we know that there are "helpful" and "harmful" bacteria. Some parasites will kill us, while others, for example, live symbiotically in our digestive tract and help us to maintain life. I'm thinking, for example, of the conscience, which opposes us and can at times feel like a parasitic entity that is there to spoil our fun, when its real purpose is to allow for vertical growth -- and to prevent a horizontal death. Recall, for example, how in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is punished by his "parasitic" conscience.
Unfortunately, I'm really running short on time here. I don't want to start into a major area and then have to stop. To be continued....
In a way, he embodies the counter-movement of all the cosmic principles we've been discussing up to this point. Indeed, this is the aracunum of counter-inspiration, which, interestingly, is not "expiration." In other words, as we've been saying in so many ways, genuine mysticism, gnosis, and magic come about as a result of the harmonious union of (↑) and (↓), while counter-inspiration would have to be some sort of caricature or counterfeit version of this -- a kind of bad breath, or hellitosis. As vision and inspiration involve tears and sweat, this card introduces us "to the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration" (MOTT). What? Yes. I didn't want to go there, but a fine example of the electrical intoxication would be the infamous Obama-tingle in Chris Matthews' pasty thigh.
I like this card, because it is also the card of the Mind Parasites. These are the self-generated demons which then have power over those who create them -- which you will no doubt notice represents a kind of pathological cycle of (↑) and (↓); more on which below.
But first, UF makes an extremely important point, that "the world of evil is a chaotic world." Which means, if you wish to create a world in which the Devil has a "free hand," so to speak, you needn't necessarily engage in evil per se. Rather, all you have to do is disrupt the celestial order and sow chaos below. (I actually prefer the word "disorder," since chaos now has a scientific meaning; from the perspective of chaos theory, processes that look chaotic may exhibit extremely deep order, but that's the topic for another post. We'll just stick with "chaos" in its colloquial sense.)
A most obvious example of cosmic order is the distinction between male and female. To blend these categories is not just foolish and unwise, but evil. Or, soon enough, it will lead to evil. I don't want to get sidetracked, but here is a depressing article by Kay Hymowitz on the contemporary state of male-female relations, Love in the Time of Darwinism. The take-away point is that the chaos engendered by feminism and other postmodern idiolatries has hardly been "liberating." Rather, in taking a wrecking ball to the nonlocal celestial hierarchy, it has "ironically" reduced human beings to a state of pure animality in their mating habits. Ladies, be careful what you whine for.
In turn, this is why the homosexual activists clamoring for the redefinition of marriage are promoting evil, pure and simple. One has to be so willfully obtuse to suggest that I am saying that this or that homosexual is evil. That's an entirely different subject. Rather, what I am saying is that I do not want a handful of judges to impose their diabolical values on the rest of us, just because they do not understand that marriage exists as a divine archetype, and that it is not for us to tamper with, any more than it is up to a judge to tamper with the laws of physics. You cannot turn my aunt into a Maserati by judicial Fiat.
One hears other boneheads saying things such as: " duh, gay marriage won't hurt my marriage. What are these conservatives afraid of?" As Dennis Prager always says, we live in the "age of stupidity," and this is about as clear an example as one could imagine. What Prager means is that we live in an age that is devoid of wisdom -- in particular, the accumulated wisdom of the centuries -- which, on a spiritual level, is no less important then the "biological wisdom" embodied in our genes.
And why do we live in an age of stupidity? Because liberals have spent the last fifty years undermining the legitimacy of the divine-human order, and therefore sowing chaos. And once you have chaos, then you have successfully destroyed any standards by which we may objectively guide our lives.
This is what I mean when I try to tell these uncomprehending "integralists" that the left is not the complement of conservative liberalism, but its very negation. A true political complementarity would nevertheless have to share the same first principles, which was more or less the case in America until the 1960s. Today, the problem is not that we differ with the left over this or that policy issue. Rather, they have entirely different first principles, principles which are not rooted in the Constitution, in American tradition, and certainly not in transcendent reality (i.e., the vertical).
So, if you think that article by Hymowitz is depressing, just wait until we've had "homosexual marriage" for a generation or two. When I say that civilization cannot survive the metaphysical chaos this will enshrine, I am not being polemical. I mean it quite literally and dispassionately. This is what happens when human sexuality is reduced to a purely horizontal category.
Even leaving spirituality to the side, the activists express such an astonishing naivete about the power of human sexuality, that it is not even childlike, because children are well aware of such fundamental categories as Father and Mother. Only a leftist could be so stupid as to deny such a primordial reality and call it "progress." As a libertarian, I do not believe it is the business of the state to tell a couple of men or women what sort of erotic partnership they wish to have. Just don't pretend that it is marriage, which it can never, ever be.
Notice that their only possible counter-argument will be a strictly horizontal one, thereby denying the very context of marriage, i.e., the sacred. By the nature of their arguments, one can tell that they have no idea what marriage actually is, in that they see it only in terms of an arbitrary "right" which some people supposedly have but others don't.
Again, it is an entirely horizontal argument. Marriage, like human freedom itself, exists prior to the state. "Homosexual marriage" can only exist if the state imposes a new definition of marriage, thereby destroying it. Yes, yes, Britney Spears or Pamela Anderson also make a mockery of marriage. That is not a counter-argument. Rather, that is the point, idiot.
Anyway, the main point is that if you want to engender evil, all you have to do is promote disorder by denying or blending categories which must remain separate in order for there to be civilization at all. This is why the Creator's very first act is one of separation amidst chaos. Note as well that the homosexual activist will accuse me of being evil because of my deference to the divine order (by which evil is measured to begin with). Is this not diabolical? No, that wasn't a rhetorical question, because while the luciferian is that which opposes the divine reality, the diabolical is that which actively undermines it. Look at how they are attempting to destroy the Boy Scouts for similar reasons.
Back to the card. UF notes that it evokes the idea of slavery, in that it depicts two people "who are attached to the pedestal of a monstrous demon." It suggests "an eminently practical lesson as to how it happens that beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it." (If you look closely, you will see that it is actually Mayor Newsom presiding over a gay wedding.)
With regard to these parasitic entities, the analogy with biology is apt, for we know that there are "helpful" and "harmful" bacteria. Some parasites will kill us, while others, for example, live symbiotically in our digestive tract and help us to maintain life. I'm thinking, for example, of the conscience, which opposes us and can at times feel like a parasitic entity that is there to spoil our fun, when its real purpose is to allow for vertical growth -- and to prevent a horizontal death. Recall, for example, how in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is punished by his "parasitic" conscience.
Unfortunately, I'm really running short on time here. I don't want to start into a major area and then have to stop. To be continued....
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Vertical Creation and the Rhythm of Eternity
Continuing with yesterday's post, as there are two cerebral hemispheres, there are naturally "two worlds" that result, given the truism that there can be no world but an experienced world.
The scientific world of abstract quantity is one world, true enough in its own way, but obviously not the real world. The scientific world is an abstract and artificial construct that sees things separately and serially, as if the world -- any world -- could ever actually be an agglomeration of discrete, atomistic particles. This metaphysic falls on the basis of its own discoveries, most notably, the wavelike sea of quantum energy that underlies our illusory experience of discrete matter (also the genome, which is much more nonlinear and holistic than biologists had assumed).
But is this sea of energy -- a sea that no human has ever seen or ever will see -- the real world? No, it is merely a physical world, an abstraction of science, a science that starts with the only world we can experience, the corporeal world of every day life. Scientists maintain that the corporeal world accessible to our senses is the secondary, derivative world, and that the abstract world of quantum physics is the more primary one.
Traditional metaphysics turns this upside-down picture back right-side up, which in turn resolves many of the paradoxes of “creationism.” The fact is, despite the best efforts of science, we remain engulfed in a Mystery -- the mystery of our origins, of our present being, and of our final destiny. Science searches outward, toward the periphery, looking at the data of the senses and into the mathematically projected past to find the answers (and in so doing abandons formal and final causation, and therefore any hope of understanding the purpose of our existence).
Mysticism reverses our gaze from the periphery to the center, looking for our source and origin in the mysterious withinness of the cosmos -- by following that withinness all the way back "upstream" to its vertical source above.
A traditional cosmology -- including Genesis -- is only secondarily about the creation of the horizontal world. It is primarily about the mysterious manifestation of reality from the darkness of nonexistence to the light of conscious experience. Out of the Great Unborn, the timeless womb of eternity, forms and beings are ceaselessly given birth and then vertically "sustained" by that same First Cause. As I hint at in the book, we are all beneficiaries of this voidgin birth.
This transcendent ground is the one place in the cosmos where we may truly gain first hand knowledge of the source of All, since the cosmos is psychic through and through. This is the real meaning of traditional cosmologies. On the one hand, they tell the story of the outward manifestation of the cosmos. But at the same time, they convey implicit knowledge of the inward vertical procession of phenomena from the great noumenal Within.
Consider it this way: the big bang didn't just happen once upon a timeless, some 14 billion years ago. Rather, a cosmos mysteriously explodes into being every moment, in every individual's consciousness. Likewise, an entire cosmos comes into being with each new birth, and a whole unrepeatable world withdraws over the subjective horizon with each death. And it's all happening now.
In this view, the vexing duality of mind and matter is resolved in the only way it can be -- by showing how both poles of the dialectic arise from a single, nonlocal source, outside space and time. Every moment -- that is, the ineffable now -- represents a ceaseless flowing out of eternity into time, accompanied by a simultaneous "flowing in" of time back to eternity. This is the cosmogonic cycle upon which grace allows us to hitch a ride, the pullmonistic rhythm of the breath of the eternal.
The beginning of my book -- through page seventeen -- attempts to convey in ponoetic language the "flowing out" of the absolute One into the Infinite many -- for example, The molten infinite pours forth a blazen torrent of incandescent finitude, as light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow; or He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image. On the one hand, these statements could be about the big bang. On the other, they could be about our own consciousness.
The end of the book -- pages 252-266 -- simply reverses the process, taking us on the ascent from the many back to the One. Again, the reality of the situation is that this is occurring on a moment-by-moment basis. You might even say that this perpetual process represents the "interior life" of the Godhead (with certain modifications introduced by the Christian trinity or Jewish Sefirot that I won't get into here; both, in their own ways, are trying to describe this "interior life" of God.)
Thus, a sample from the end of my book reads as we approach the singularity at the bigending of cosmic history: Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding binding river empties to the sea. Only here are we provisionally cured of plurality as we are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany and exhaled himself into a world of sorrow and ignorance, no longer dispersed and refracted by so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.
Traditional cosmologies -- like any other spiritual truth -- will not yield their meanings to the cognitively greedy accustomed only to linear, exterior, fragmented, and scientistic ways of knowing; one cannot simply grasp at them, but must approach the endeavor with open hands (and more importantly, open heart and mind). And whatever you do, don't be serious. Sincere, absolutely. Serious, never. For,
Could it be true that in jesting we are contemplating? Yes. As do all who jest, in jesting we contemplate. --Plotinus
Addendum: I just finished this book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and it's remarkable how similar the arguments are to mine. Feser does an outstanding job of demonstrating how this guy named Aquinas absolutely demolishes the feeble and quite blatantly irrational arguments of the atheistic crowd. Unfortunately, the book is so abusive and polemical that it sometimes distracts from the brilliance of the arguments. I mean, I certainly don't mind sticking it to the adversary, but it should be done with a little style -- with a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.
In any event, look for this Aquinas fellow to gain some notoriety, although I can't imagine that any university would ever hire him, much less offer him tenure, given his thorough debunking of the fashionable materialism of the times.
The scientific world of abstract quantity is one world, true enough in its own way, but obviously not the real world. The scientific world is an abstract and artificial construct that sees things separately and serially, as if the world -- any world -- could ever actually be an agglomeration of discrete, atomistic particles. This metaphysic falls on the basis of its own discoveries, most notably, the wavelike sea of quantum energy that underlies our illusory experience of discrete matter (also the genome, which is much more nonlinear and holistic than biologists had assumed).
But is this sea of energy -- a sea that no human has ever seen or ever will see -- the real world? No, it is merely a physical world, an abstraction of science, a science that starts with the only world we can experience, the corporeal world of every day life. Scientists maintain that the corporeal world accessible to our senses is the secondary, derivative world, and that the abstract world of quantum physics is the more primary one.
Traditional metaphysics turns this upside-down picture back right-side up, which in turn resolves many of the paradoxes of “creationism.” The fact is, despite the best efforts of science, we remain engulfed in a Mystery -- the mystery of our origins, of our present being, and of our final destiny. Science searches outward, toward the periphery, looking at the data of the senses and into the mathematically projected past to find the answers (and in so doing abandons formal and final causation, and therefore any hope of understanding the purpose of our existence).
Mysticism reverses our gaze from the periphery to the center, looking for our source and origin in the mysterious withinness of the cosmos -- by following that withinness all the way back "upstream" to its vertical source above.
A traditional cosmology -- including Genesis -- is only secondarily about the creation of the horizontal world. It is primarily about the mysterious manifestation of reality from the darkness of nonexistence to the light of conscious experience. Out of the Great Unborn, the timeless womb of eternity, forms and beings are ceaselessly given birth and then vertically "sustained" by that same First Cause. As I hint at in the book, we are all beneficiaries of this voidgin birth.
This transcendent ground is the one place in the cosmos where we may truly gain first hand knowledge of the source of All, since the cosmos is psychic through and through. This is the real meaning of traditional cosmologies. On the one hand, they tell the story of the outward manifestation of the cosmos. But at the same time, they convey implicit knowledge of the inward vertical procession of phenomena from the great noumenal Within.
Consider it this way: the big bang didn't just happen once upon a timeless, some 14 billion years ago. Rather, a cosmos mysteriously explodes into being every moment, in every individual's consciousness. Likewise, an entire cosmos comes into being with each new birth, and a whole unrepeatable world withdraws over the subjective horizon with each death. And it's all happening now.
In this view, the vexing duality of mind and matter is resolved in the only way it can be -- by showing how both poles of the dialectic arise from a single, nonlocal source, outside space and time. Every moment -- that is, the ineffable now -- represents a ceaseless flowing out of eternity into time, accompanied by a simultaneous "flowing in" of time back to eternity. This is the cosmogonic cycle upon which grace allows us to hitch a ride, the pullmonistic rhythm of the breath of the eternal.
The beginning of my book -- through page seventeen -- attempts to convey in ponoetic language the "flowing out" of the absolute One into the Infinite many -- for example, The molten infinite pours forth a blazen torrent of incandescent finitude, as light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow; or He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image. On the one hand, these statements could be about the big bang. On the other, they could be about our own consciousness.
The end of the book -- pages 252-266 -- simply reverses the process, taking us on the ascent from the many back to the One. Again, the reality of the situation is that this is occurring on a moment-by-moment basis. You might even say that this perpetual process represents the "interior life" of the Godhead (with certain modifications introduced by the Christian trinity or Jewish Sefirot that I won't get into here; both, in their own ways, are trying to describe this "interior life" of God.)
Thus, a sample from the end of my book reads as we approach the singularity at the bigending of cosmic history: Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding binding river empties to the sea. Only here are we provisionally cured of plurality as we are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany and exhaled himself into a world of sorrow and ignorance, no longer dispersed and refracted by so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.
Traditional cosmologies -- like any other spiritual truth -- will not yield their meanings to the cognitively greedy accustomed only to linear, exterior, fragmented, and scientistic ways of knowing; one cannot simply grasp at them, but must approach the endeavor with open hands (and more importantly, open heart and mind). And whatever you do, don't be serious. Sincere, absolutely. Serious, never. For,
Could it be true that in jesting we are contemplating? Yes. As do all who jest, in jesting we contemplate. --Plotinus
Addendum: I just finished this book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and it's remarkable how similar the arguments are to mine. Feser does an outstanding job of demonstrating how this guy named Aquinas absolutely demolishes the feeble and quite blatantly irrational arguments of the atheistic crowd. Unfortunately, the book is so abusive and polemical that it sometimes distracts from the brilliance of the arguments. I mean, I certainly don't mind sticking it to the adversary, but it should be done with a little style -- with a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.
In any event, look for this Aquinas fellow to gain some notoriety, although I can't imagine that any university would ever hire him, much less offer him tenure, given his thorough debunking of the fashionable materialism of the times.
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