Only You Can Prevent the Apocalypse

Today's highly orthoparadoxical invocation:

For in the same being of God where God is above being and above distinction, there I myself was, there I willed myself and committed myself to create this man. --Eckhart

To summarize Bolton's position, the creation bifurcates out into fate (or nature) and providence, so that man represents the possibility of their re-union. In turn, man bifurcates out into body and intellect, the union of which is the soul.

Now, one way to understand cosmic evolution -- which recapitulates in miniature in man -- is to see it as the gradual mastering of fate (and the conquest of dimensionality, more on which later). As Bolton writes, "the moment when man arrives on earth he belongs to Fate, which leads him captive for a long time in the vortex of fatality." You might say that, with the Fall, we are cast naked into the fate stream with no canoe. Still, man "bears a divine seed within him which can never be entirely confounded" by fate.

Nevertheless, it will take mankind countless generations to master fate and slowly discover its destiny, both individually and collectively (individuals were able to do it long prior to any large collectives). From the Raccoon perspective, we look to history for certain easily identifiable points at which there was a tremendous influx of vertical energies to help lift us from fate to destiny. Some of these would be Abraham's failure to sacrifice Isaac, the downloading of the Torah, the Incarnation, the emergence of free markets, the American revolution, the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan, etc.

Eventually man is able to discover that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to life and liberty, which is to officially plant our colors on the side of destiny. It is to say that we are no longer controlled by fate. Leftism is, of course, the atavistic embrace of fate, i.e., passive victimhood, so it is hardly as if fate has been vanquished.

When the left talks about "freedom," it is necessarily in a highly limited way that paradoxically frees one to abandon oneself to fate. In other words, since they deny the higher realm -- the true object of our free will -- will is reduced to mere horizontal willfulness. It is will with no real freedom, since it denies the sufficient reason for our freedom, which is to know the absolute and govern ourselves accordingly. A will that is not lured by the good, true, and beautiful is not actually free, but a plaything of fate.

So, each of us "has the means to unite himself or herself in an equally natural way to either the Providential or Fatidic order" (Bolton). But again, genuine free will cannot belong to nature, but can only be understood as a gift of Providence. Therefore, our Founders were correct to insist that to deny God is to deny freedom. And as we have mentioned before, it is also ipso facto to deny the mind, which is the "internal space" of freedom's possibilities.

Which invites another paradox, in that only by becoming a "slave" to providence are we actually free. But really, this is no more paradoxical than saying that only by becoming a slave to truth do we gain wisdom. No one has ever gained wisdom by declaring his independence from truth, a sad fact to which our liberal universities offer abundant testimony. No. "The soul which aligns itself with Providence, and therefore with freedom, will thus be the one which realizes the possibilities of the spiritual nature to the fullest extent possible for the individual concerned" (Bolton).

Consider our dispute with the reductionistic Darwinians, who specifically deny Providence and believe they can fully account for man with recourse only to the realm of fate, or nature. Since real ontological freedom is necessarily abolished in this crude reduction, then so too is the possibility of truth -- which is again dependent upon freedom. In other words, if we are not intrinsically free to discover truth, then we can only know what we are fated to know -- which is no knowledge at all, just an extension of necessity.

Again, it is by aligning ourselves with Providence that we actualize our true freedom. This is why the "perfect prayer" includes the formula thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. That's what it really really says. It even outlines the way in which this free will is actualized, that is, by assimilating each day our daily vertical bread.

In turn, this is why we must "resist temptation," which specifically refers to the horizontal world of fate, which operates through hypnosis, seduction, and temptation of those parts of ourselves that remain mired in fate, i.e., mind parasites. Again, a mind parasite is like a closed, unevolving, circular entity that goes on being by borrowing a piece of our subjectivity and "going into hiding" below the threshold of consciousness. It then enlists the objects and experiences it needs to continue its viral pseudo-life, or "living death." Only when you start to feel enslaved by your mind parasites are you beginning to break free of them. The most unfree people generally feel quite free, since they don't stir up trouble their mind parasites.

A truly free will would have to be "one," would it not? Since Wisdom is one, it can do all things (Wisdom 7:27). So long as one is inhabited by various sub-wills at cross-purposes with one another, that's a kind of perversion of freedom. It is as if the one will is "broken" into fragments that are then purloined by various subpersonalities. Generally speaking, the sicker the individual, the more autonomous and split off are the subpersonalities. Likewise, the healthier the individual, the more unified the will -- and therefore, the more real the freedom.

Looked at in this way, one can easily see how "the truth sets you free," because freedom is really a prolongation of truth. Again, if there were no truth, there would be absolutely no possibility of freedom, any more than art would be possible in the absence of beauty. Is an artist less free because he is a slave to beauty? Hardly. Beauty is a kind of breach in the fabric of nature through which celestial energies flow, and which always carry with them an ability to "transport" us to their source. In short, beauty is liberating. Haven't you ever noticed how enclosed and "hemmed in" you feel in an ugly environment?

This is also how I would feel in typical university -- and also, sad to say, in a typical church. If a church service doesn't give access to real truth, real freedom, and real beauty, then something has gone wrong. Its only reason for being can be to facilitate an experience in O, which is much deeper than any mere (k). Reduced to (k), religion is hardly better than scientism. Which is one reason why I prefer so many of the premodern theologians, whose minds and beings hadn't yet been hijacked by the cultural demands of a spiritually desiccated scientism.

Speaking of which, contemporary man stands at a crossroads. Which is nothing new, since we are always at that crossroads between fate and destiny, whether we know it or not. However, just as there are historical ingressions of vertical energies, we can equally see periods in which the tiller of history is seized by the horizontaloids. When that happens, the center cannot hold (the interior center being a reflection of the One), and a kind of hell is unloosed from below.

Here's how Bolton describes it: "as mankind fails to realize the role as Mediator, natural forces grow increasingly violent and chaotic, and disasters become more frequent. The Apocalypse is the final extreme of this disorder."

Don't think "it can't happen here," since it can only happen here. And only we are free to prevent it, since the unfree are its architects. (BTW, I'm using "apocalypse" in a more colloquial sense, as "ultimate cataclysm.")

Voice your support for cosmic freedom: