Frigid Lies and Molten Truth

Lately we've fallen into this pattern of touching on politics on the weekend, but returning to deeper things on Monday. This follows the upside down and inside out peltanschauung of the Raccoon, but in a way it makes perfect nonsense, because transcendence can take care of itself on the weekends. It's during the week that it is more of a challenge to not get lost in ephemera, just as it's more difficult to embody the "Christmas spirit" in mid-July or the "Toots spirit" before beer o'clock.

But more generally, we want to embody our realization at all times. Being without doing isn't worth much; virtue must "radiate" from knowledge. And doing without being is pretty much worthless. (Although the former needs to be qualified, for as Will has reminded us, there is definitely a nonlocal influence that radiates from the genuine saint, even if history never records his celestial presents.)

The point is, it's relatively easy to slip through the cracks of slack on weekends, but they tend to "seal over" come Monday.

Speaking of prisons, that remands me. We all know about post-traumatic stress. But it is also possible to be "traumatized" by the good, in such a way that it "haunts" us for the rest of our lives. But this haunting is none other than the recollection of paradise, so it's not something to run away from, but toward. For example, when you first fall in love, this is a profound recollection of something that was waiting to be tapped into. To say that human beings are "haunted by love" would be an understatement.

In my case, I am very aware of being haunted by the recollection of summer vacation, which represented the release of the soul into a trackless expanse of infinite slack after nine months of bondage and servitude to the Conspiracy. Not for nothing does the Great Seal of the Raccoons depict Toots leading the children of Bensonhurst out of an old-fashioned schoolhouse.

I also remember my last day of high school. Sure, it's cool to be a cosmically liberated, thrice-cleared operating thetan in the Vertical Church of Upper Tonga. Nevertheless, I have to admit that it doesn't quite match the euphoria of graduating high school. Little did I know that I was simply going from a pent-up frying pan to a fiery outhouse, what with my forthcoming looniversity brainwashing.

Enough gnostalgia. Suffice it to say that if you look at your Raccoon calendar, you will see that today we celebrate the annual Feast of Abner, i.e., opening day of the baseball season, which represents a miraculous ingression of slack into this horizontal wasteland.

Now, the fact that we understand objects, i.e., The World, means that the world is made of "communication." It is full of messages of all kinds, just waiting to be decoded -- quantum mechanical messages, genetic messages, chemical messages, pheromonal messages, divine messages, signs from the third base coach, etc.

Thus, prior to what appears to be the most obvious ontological fact of existence, i.e., the distinction between subjects and objects, there is something even more fundamental: communication. "Comm-unication" is the prior oneness that bifurcates into subjects and objects, and without which objects could not be known and subjects could not know them.

Or, contrary to what atheists and other assorted morons are always saying, if this were a meaningless universe, no one could ever realize it.

Now, interestingly -- this is getting a bit aheart of oursophs -- but what distinguishes the Trinity from those cheaply made bargain gods is that it is irreducibly communicative. Thus, this unique metaphysic renders what is otherwise quite problematic -- an intelligible cosmos that never stops communicating with itself -- an inevitability.

The cosmos "speaks" because there are subjects; and because there is a Subject, the cosmos speaks. True, you are free to argue that the cosmos doesn't speak intelligibly, but not without sacrificing truth, freedom, and intelligibility. And since the substance of man is one part truth, one part freedom, the materialist commits ontological suicide.

Which is fine. The immorality -- the unforgivable crime -- occurs when these undead body snatchers engage in the soul murder of others, especially the innocent kits. Which is why we say without exaggeration or hyperbole that the leftist takeover of the educational system is a kind of....

Let's see, "genocide" is already taken. Let's call it "pneumacide," i.e., the murder of the spirit. This is no joke, as anyone can attest who has recovered from the assault of these elumenationists. I know for a fact that I'm still recovering, and maybe always will be. It's somewhat analogous to nearly dying from some terrible illness, and then having some permanent residuals as a result.

An image comes to mind. On the original Star Trek, they were beaming down some crew members to a particular planet. But in this case, there was a danger that they might rematerialize within solid rock, and then be unrecoverable. In so many ways, a secular brainwashing is to be beamed down into solid rock is it not? Or maybe ice.

Schuon: "Mistaking the ice that imprisons us for Reality, we do not acknowledge what it excludes and experience no desire for deliverance; we try to compel the ice to be happiness."

We must melt the ice, pulverize the rock, and regain our original fluidity. This can only occur in the Great Interiority of the subject, not by chasing phantoms in the object world, which reduces the subject to an effect rather than a cause. Freedom "enters" in this space between subject and object, because, like truth, it is prior to both.

But for the same reason, as Balthasar explains, man is the first entity that is freely capable of lying. That is, with the emergence of man, the Lie enters creation. In fact, if you remember your Genesis, the very first recorded statement of man is a lie to God: I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.

The Bible often makes a critical point by virtue of the order in which something occurs, so surely the first utterance of man is fraught with existential and spiritual significance.

In this case, you could say that the Bible records the emergence of the first liberal, in that Adam immediately tries to excuse his culpability by depicting himself as the victim: hey, you scared me! It's your fault! But that doesn't fly, so next he blames the woman. In fact, there is also an oral teaching that has been handed down from generation to generation and which still lives today, in which Adam blames his malfeasance on conservative talk radio.

Now, the Lie is the beginning of man's self-imprisonment under that sheet of ice alluded to above. It reminds me of when children used to get trapped in those old refrigerators that locked from the outside, for once man gets into the Lie, it is very difficult to get out. For inside it is as dark, cold, and airless as an empty raven's soul.

Truth, like love, radiates, whereas the lie compacts and restricts. Or, looked at another way, truth is like an infinitely hard jewel, whereas the lie disperses and dissipates. The left conflates all of these categories, resulting in beautiful "radiant lies" such as socialism, or the "hardened falsehoods" of political correctness. This results in a kind of perverse mirror homage to conservatism, because the left is not about "progress," but about conserving their "permanent lies." This is also why it is such a parody of religion, since, in denying the sacred, it confers sanctity on the profane.

Because truth radiates, we have speech, or communication. If we didn't have speech, we would combust from the heat. As HvB says, in the absence of the gift of "saying truth," we would be "burned up by an inward abundance that could not be expressed outwardly. It would be like a light that had to shine in itself without being able to emit any rays." Most Raccoons are en fuego, and the only way to turn down the heat is to post about it and try to light up some other folks. Yes, we arsons of God.

But this heat ultimately radiates from that burning bush that is never consumed. This is an irreducible mystery, for the more light we radiate, the more comes in -- like a brush fire that begins to generate its own wind. True, the Spirit blows where it will, but it blows even harder in certain self-generated weather patterns. This has been my experience of immersing myself in the world of HvB, which is like a tornado that lifts my little house over the reignbelow. Call it a Funnel of Love.

It is a fact that the gradual approach of these ontological levels of the spirit's form of existence is synonymous with an interior "clearing," irradiation, and illumination of being. The spiritual substance is light in itself.... Certain accounts of this fact suggest that the levels between matter and spirit are also levels of being's intelligibility. --Theo-Logic: The Truth of the World