On Honoring Truth with Knowledge

I'm just skimming the Theo-Logic while waiting for my brain to come on line, and I noticed an arresting phrase. It's in the context of a discussion of how the lover perceives the ideal within the beloved, piercing through the falsity, the veneer, to the core, or essence, in such a way that the beloved may be known to himself -- his true self -- through the gaze of the lover.

Then he says that in the lover's eyes, the imperfect image has "no right to exist," and is therefore not honored with knowledge.

That was the phrase that struck me: not honored with knowledge. This would imply that knowledge is a kind of honor that is conferred upon reality; more than that, it would mean that truth is honorable, while there is something dishonorable about things that are false or unreal. Therefore, to elevate them to truth is a kind of double dishonoring, for it is also a negation of man's highest potential, even his reason for being, i.e., the link between the Absolute and relative.

Now, there are lies and liars. We all know that. But there are also people who are lies; if there is truth in them -- which there always is, because no one can exist and not partake of truth -- it is accidental, whereas the Lie forms their substance. It is as if they have exchanged one essence for another, as a result of a kind of.... satanic eucharist, or "dyscharist." For truly, it is not philosophy but necrophilia, "the love of death."

In other words, they eat lies, they drink lies, they play with lies, they work with lies, and soon enough, the lie is so woven into their substance through this daily communion, that the cosmos is fully inverted. Not only has the lie become the truth, but the truth becomes a lie.

But it doesn't end there. Rather, in order to "go on being," the person will have to spend the rest of their life "consuming the lie," or else face a kind of "double death," for they will lose the illusion that keeps them going. Losing their illusion would be like awakening from a nightmare, only to find oneself in a real gulag. Therefore, they cherish their lie, even while resenting reality.

I hesitate to do this, because he'll no doubt think I'm honoring his right to exist by calling attention to him. It's just that I check my technorati links in the morning to see what people are saying about me, and it's such a pervect exhumeple of what we're discussing here. It takes what might be overly abstract for some of you, and makes it completely concrete.

It's such a transparent example, that it hardly requires comment on my part. Rather, I'll just let Mtraven speak for himself, so you can all understand the agenda underneath the mask -- an agenda which "has no right to exist" and which should not be "honored with knowledge" -- unless it is in the form of a cautionary tale for you kits who don't understand what is at stake here. i.e., your immortal soul.

"The left is about resistance to authority, God is the ultimate authority, Satan is the rebel, fine. Hail to His Satanic Majesty!"

No, he's not just being gliberal. He favorably quotes the patently diabolical Aleister Crowley, who wrote that “I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning." He also references the uber-moonbat Saul Alinsky, who openly acknowledged his debt to "to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

This is sufficient to establish what we have said all along, that the left is not "progressive" -- for progress can only occur in the context of movement toward truth -- but reactionary to the core. They are not revolutionary, for that term is reserved for people such as America's founders, who were actually doing battle with the lie that is "the world," or, let us say, the "worldly powers." Revolvere is to return to the origin by "rolling back."

Rolling back what? Well, for starters, rolling back all of the accumulated lies of the counter-revolutionaries of the left. To cite an obvious example, this is what Ronald Reagan attempted to do -- to roll back the foreign and domestic reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries of the left, who have no right to exist (their ideas, not the people).

And now what is happening? Once again, the counter-revolutionaries, led by an acolyte of the devil-worshipping Saul Alinsky, are back in the saddle. Remember, he was merely following in the footsteps of "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment..., Lucifer." In this regard, let's just let one of his clowns again speak for himself:

"Satan has always been a more attractive character than God, because rebels are cool and God is such an asshole. Aside from suborning genocide, getting all bent out of shape if he's not worshiped sufficiently, and other assorted Biblical atrocities, just look at the people he has speak for him on Earth. Who wouldn't want to be on the opposite side from such people?"

You see? It's all self-evident. Satan is cool and attractive, God is an asshole, the Bible is a compendium of atrocities, and Godly people are demonic. I never engage in polemic, unless I'm just trying to be funny. But when I say that the worldview of the left is precisely upside down and inside out, I am again being quite literal and matter of fact. Does not Mtraven confirm everything I've said?

Remember what we were saying about Schuon the other day? Of course, like any other human being, he was hardly perfect; indeed, he would be the first to remind us that there is no one good but the One. Nevertheless, on the whole, he was "patently angelic." I mean, I can literally never repay him for the spiritual assistance he has given me.

But here's is how a Liar sees the same person: "He's a theologian with a cult following; a member of a group of 'pereniallists' who disdain New Ageists because...well, I can't tell you, they seem about the same to me...." He includes a brief quote from Schuon, who expresses the truism that certainty of religious truth surely comes from God, for where else could it come from? I think we all realize that faith is a grace that we could never produce out of our own substance. But for Mtraven, this is "a sure recipe for mental disaster. It is almost a parody, a distillation, of the self-reinforcing parasitic brain worm model of religion."

Again, a fascinating inversion. One of Schuon's essential teachings -- and something for which he would never claim credit, for it is universal -- is that it is only the uncreated intellect that can participate directly in truth, since it is of the same substance as truth. But just savor this final pompous inversion, the coup de gracelessness: "[I]n the world of the intellect, where I like to locate myself, everything is open to question. Conservatives complain that the academy is left-wing; but it seems as if thought itself is left-wing, so it's really not that much a surprise."

This has a kind of perverse beauty, does it not? For it means that the highest "truth" is actually doubt, which means that the cretin who can doubt the most truth is the highest intellect. We call this the state of tenure, and on this we agree: "it seems as if thought itself is left-wing, so it's really not that much a surprise."

But when he uses the word "thought," we clearly aren't talking about the same thing. For us, thought is what bears on truth, or else it isn't really thinking, just "mental agitation." If it is only the capacity to doubt, then again, this ineluctably results in a "philosophy of stupidity." The priceless gift that is the intellect is the ability to know; and not just know anything, but to know truth and to know it with certainty.

Let's see what my fellow cult-leader, Schuon, had to say about the intellect: "The Intellect ‘is divine’, first because it is a knower -- or because it is not a non-knower -- and secondly because it reduces all phenomena to their Principle; because it sees the Cause in every effect, and thus surmounts, at a certain level, the vertiginous and devouring multiplicity of the phenomenal world." As we have said before, the intellect reduces multiplicity to unity in whatever realm it operates. Yes, of course, there is an element of doubt involved, but it is analogous to the catabolism that is necessary to metabolize truth.

However, for most men of the present age -- and again, this is soph-evident -- "the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality, although doubtless there is no watertight partition between it and the reason, for a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect; be that as it may, the respective operations of the reason -- or the mind -- and of the intellect are fundamentally different from the point of view that interests us here, despite certain appearances due to the fact that every man is a thinking being, whether he be wise or ignorant."

Again, there is intellect and there is its caricature, the mere intellectualism of the tenured.

And what did one of my other favorite cult leaders, Sri Aurobindo, say about doubt? Satprem writes that "The day came when Sri Aurobindo had had enough of these intellectual exercises. He had probably realized that one can go on amassing knowledge indefinitely, reading and learning languages, even learning all the languages in the world and reading all the books in the world, and yet not progress an inch. For the mind does not seek truly to know, even though it appears to -- it seeks to grind. If by chance the machine were to come to a stop because knowledge had been obtained, it would soon rise up in revolt and find something new to grind, just for the sake of grinding and grinding."

Now, notice two things; first, Aurobindo had achieved the summit of philosophical intelligence, which essentially leaves one on a plane where the endless circles of deconstruction and synthesis are inevitable, with no nonlocal vector to guide them to their proper end in Truth as such. In other words, deconstruction is simply intelligence playing with the same facts to come up with radically disparate conclusions. Equally intelligent people can easily be on one side or the other of a particular dispute, or even arrive at opposite ideologies.

But this is not the path to Truth. Unless intelligence is infused with the descent of a higher light, it will forever remain on its own partial plane. Here again, Balthasar speaks of "the moment when one's own inspiration mysteriously passes over into inspiration through the genius, the daimon, or the indwelling god, a moment when the 'spirit that contains the god' obeys a superior command which as such implies form and is able to impose form." This is impossible in the absence of true faith (o) -- which is the real doubt, for it is doubt of the unreal -- through which the person divests himself "of any intent to give himself shape, who makes himself available as matter for the divine action."

Any being that is deprived of... truth, perishes in the long run from want of air and light. Love treats what should not be as it deserves, as something that has absolutely no lawful title to being and whose punishment is simply to have its existence overlooked. --Theo-Logic: The Truth of the World.

Therefore, we could never honor Mtraven, only love him.