Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Riding the Cosmic Treadmill to Nowhere while Gorging on the Rotten Fruit of Statism

New reader RS likes what he's hearing so far. For, unlike my competitors, my evolutionary cosmic vision offers a treadmill that actually goes somewhere. Or, you could say that it is a rat race you can actually win, or an eternal Groundhog Day in which you are forever trapped in the same happy ending. Or, you could just say that it is an ascending spiral.

Again, nihilsim or theism, absolutism or relativism. If everything reduces to matter, then things are very FUBAR, and nothing's gonna be okay. Conversely, if everything is God, then it's all gonna work out. No, we don't know exactly how or when, but that's were faith comes in, for once you have determined that God cannot not be, then it's usually not too long before you also discover that he cannot not be Good, passing appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

That being the case, then there is no real ontological basis for worry, despair, whining, etc. I mean, you are still free to indulge in them, but they certainly give no added value. Unless one is a leftist, in which case they become one's primary mode of being, as they are the deathline to the state. The squeaky constituency gets the pork.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons I don't do a great deal of psychotherapy anymore. In order to be an effective therapist, one must have empathy. But I have quite literally lost my ability to empathize with most human problems. You just have no idea of the sorts of peripheral things the rank-and-foul worry about. Perhaps you do, since you no doubt have relatives. Their lives are entirely beside the point.

But most people live in a world of trivia and drama. There is no real movement (except downward), only agitation. What their trivial pursuits rob from them in terms of depth, the drama confers in terms of intensity, or affect. Thus, it's very much like TV, which I described in my book as "a nihilocracy of urgent nonsense." That's the other kind of treadmill -- the kind that goes nowhere fast.

Again, there is only one adventure, the Adventure of Consciousness. Either you are on this adventure, or you are not. I have no real problem with the grazing multitude of unadventurous cosmic placemarkers. The worst offenders are the people who displace the spiritual adventure to the political plane. They cause most of the mischief in the world, whether in Iran or in the United States. Here again, this is where the political religion of Islamism converges with the political religion of leftism.

In reading this excellent new book on Reagan's presidency, I've really come to appreciate the near impossibility of a "conservative revolution." Make no mistake: there was no "conservative revolution" in the 1980s. Rather, there was only a Reagan revolution.

Among other sources, Reagan's diaries show the extent to which he had to do battle with Republicans just as much as Democrats. Quite often, he stood alone amidst all the abuse hurled at him from the Democrat media-academic complex plus members of own party -- even his own cabinet! There was quite literally no distinction between his American critics and Soviet propaganda (often the Soviets got their talking points from the American left, as do Islamists today).

It's just very, very difficult to promise people nothing but their God-given liberty. First of all, people who love liberty rarely get involved with politics. Rather, politics attracts people who are interested in power. And a person who is primarily interested in power is most likely going to be a lost soul at best. Such a person "finds" himself through the exercise of power, in the same way that any mentally and spiritually unbalanced person does. That is, they get an emotional charge that confers a temporary sense of meaning.

But this is transient and must be reenacted again and again. I was reading the other day that over the course of his diabolical career, Ted Kennedy was responsible for helping to pass something like 5,000 laws (I think that was the figure -- correct me if I'm wrong). Some of them were no doubt helpful, but I'm guessing that the vast majority may be likened to endless links in burdensome chain we all must drag around for the sake of the state. With the forging of each of those links, Ted Kennedy no doubt felt good about himself. To our everlasting detriment.

Yes, this does all return to the subject of the proofs of God, for the ontological bifurcation alluded to above -- i.e., theism or nihilism -- results in very different fruits. Kennedy's lifetime achievement reduces to the rotten fruit of statism, the religion of nihilists. For such an upside-down person, "Essence turns back toward form, Substance toward accident, the Center toward the periphery, Life toward death" (Schuon). Of course Kennedy was the very embodiment and bellowing spokeshole of the Culture of Death.

But for the properly oriented person, it's the opposite movement: "the Inward vivifies the outward and resurrects the kernels of which we are composed -- products on the one hand of creation, secondarily, of our own attitudes and actions." Here again, vertical and horizontal causation: we are the products, yes, of God, but also of our own choices. And the more our choices are constrained by the false god of the state, the more we handicap God, for we are less free to do good.

38 comments:

Joan of Argghh! said...

"Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time." -C. S. Lewis

Teddy lived long enough to prove Lewis right.

.

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, he only dug himself deeper.

Alan said...

"That being the case, then there is no real ontological basis for worry, "

I am putting this post on the wall in front of my desk. I "know" this but forget it just as soon as I've remembered it and then don't remember it for days or weeks at a time.

Alfred E. Newman had it right!

(aside: I don't know the meaning of this but Google's word verification for this comment was "all is red" )

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, there are obviously things to worry about, just no good reason to worry about them.

swiftone said...

"..most people live in a world of trivia and drama. There is no real movement (except downward), only agitation. What their trivial pursuits rob from them in terms of depth, the drama confers in terms of intensity.."

Do many of the coonish types look around and spend time wondering what is wrong? I love getting old. It no longer bothers me (much) that I just can't get worked up over a lot of the agenda items other people find pressingly important. So my focus seems to always be elsewhere. Bring on that spiral. Let my gerbil wheel spin in a strange new direction, please.

WV: disma ...Dis may be important, but more likely it is not.

Petey said...

Yes, this is why the left is always in full crisis mode, in order to knock you out of your spiritual tree and into the mud with them.

Van Harvey said...

"Again, there is only one adventure, the Adventure of Consciousness. Either you are on this adventure, or you are not. I have no real problem with the grazing multitude of unadventurous cosmic placemarkers. The worst offenders are the people who displace the spiritual adventure to the political plane. They cause most of the problems in the world, whether in Iran or in the United States. Here again, this is where the political religion of Islamism converges with the political religion of leftism."

This together with that rendition of the Official "Royal Raccoons Anthem" at the end there, makes me wonder who is up for adventure. How many of your daily acquaintances, can you imagine, silliness aside (or... maybe not), can you imagine actually joining a club, one that requires dressing up in archetypal costume, as behaving as if you were in some way but a temporal embodiment of a timeless concept, Form, Ideal, and deepened your own actual self, through that act of adventurous 'playing pretend'?

Can you imagine anyone, above the very young, willing to put on a 'silly' coat and cap? Let alone do the 'tail wiggle'? How can you enter into adventure, without in some way being willing to engage in that vertical adventure?

How would it be anything other than a tourists sight unseeing trip without it?

Van Harvey said...

If you aren't willing to 'play pretend' in your daily life, how does any part of your life, become an adventure?

I suppose the drug addiction rates and leftist party ranks sort of provide an answer to that.

It doesn't become an adventure, and you become bored to death without a constant stream of distractions.

Ugh.

Pass the Raccoon cap please.

Job said...

"It's just very, very difficult to promise people nothing but their God-given liberty. First of all, people who love liberty rarely get involved with politics. Rather, politics attracts people who are interested in power. And a person who is primarily interested in power is most likely going to be a lost soul at best. Such a person "finds" himself through the exercise of power, in the same way that any mentally and spiritually unbalanced person does. That is, they get an emotional charge that confers a temporary sense of meaning." ....pretty discouraging because it means that if the liberty lovers don't play, the game, if only in the here and now, becomes far less free. Yet when the liberty lovers do play (and win, if on message) they don't follow up and reverse/erase all the freedom stifling laws and rules created by the statists....Very discouraging....so Gagdad, how does a Reagan make the choice to play in that field at all???

Russell said...

"..most people live in a world of trivia and drama. There is no real movement (except downward), only agitation. What their trivial pursuits rob from them in terms of depth, the drama confers in terms of intensity.."

It's a washing machine, but instead of getting rid of the filth, it grinds it into the very warp and weft of the fabric.


"And the more our choices are constrained by the false god of the state, the more we handicap God, for we are less free to do good."

Compulsorily compassion isn't compassion.

Shelling over tax dollars and slack to fund yet another social program man-made disaster isn't healing anyone souls. Padding pockets, yes, healing, no.

Gagdad Bob said...

Job--

Not sure. Reagan was a very special being, a sort of an American political mystic. It's like asking "where are all the Churchills?!" Part of the problem is that leftism suppresses greatness of character and nobility of soul from the earliest age.

Van Harvey said...

"Make no mistake: there was no "conservative revolution" in the 1980s. Rather, there was only a Reagan revolution."

Sticking with beating my previous point into submission, the other book on Reagan I mentioned this weekend ('Reagan's Secret War' I think), it strikes me being a necessary factor (the 'playing pretend' into the archetypal adventure) to the point the authors made about Reagan in their book; that as early as 1963, Reagan developed the idea that the threat of Nuclear War had to be ended, and that the only options for that was either surrender (guess his position on that, the leftist preference), nuking the other side first, which would make the whole effort a failure, or get the other side to realize that they couldn't win and that they COULD back down without being destroyed, and that he, from way back then, saw the Role that needed to be played, and focused on becoming the person that would play it.

That didn’t happen by an over concern for day to day distractions and a fear of looking silly. He foresaw the Role that needed to be played, prepared for the part, and played it to the hilt.

The Academy is not capable of awarding an award for that performance, they are completely unable to even acknowledge the play.

Van Harvey said...

Joan said "Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time." -C. S. Lewis

Teddy lived long enough to prove Lewis right."


Joan, I think the spigot of that fouled fountain was left on far too long.

Wish it were just a flash flood.

James said...

Van,

Indeed my problems with addiction happened because I was bored. Life didn't have any zing. Addiction is forgetting how to have fun.

Bob said...

Bobloger says: That being the case, then there is no real ontological basis for worry, despair, whining, etc….This, by the way, is one of the reasons I don't do a great deal of psychotherapy anymore. In order to be an effective therapist, one must have empathy. But I have quite literally lost my ability to empathize with most human problems.

Boink! How about that! After 25 years in the ministry, I arrived at the same bus stop, maybe not by the same bus rout. Perhaps 10% of my counseling dealt with souls facing an ontological impasse for which they needed assistance, like, they ran over a family member with a tractor. The remainder of my consultations, well, they just wanted me to dance with them to the discordant music of their tangled passions, never even allowing me to lead. “I cannot stick to my diet and my husband is ruining our credit rating.” I got tired of telling them to buy larger clothes and get a better husband. I wanted to tell them “go run over your kid with a tractor then come back and see me.” So empathy was not my strongest attribute.

Young Martin Luther’s confessor, after growing weary of his trivial transgressing, finally told him to go commit some real sins…something they both could really sink their teeth into I suppose. Really helping people usually means telling them the last thing they want to hear.

Gagdad Bob said...

Badda bing! There's a name for what you are, Mister: purebred Raccoon.

julie said...

And the more our choices are constrained by the false god of the state, the more we handicap God, for we are less free to do good.

Prager: The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen

Gazriel said...

Nothing to do with the post, but I want to report on a very Coonish author of fiction: Haruki Murakami.

I just finished his masterpiece "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and have rarely had such a satisfying reading experience. Completing it yesterday I have absolutely no desire to read ANYTHING, being so full from the experience.

Simultaneously historical, magical, psychologically astute, transcendent, and over-flowing with meaning Beyond the self, for any of you looking to step away from the Light of saints but want to retain incredible depth and span, give it a try.

Word.

Endurion said...

Martin Luther had it right though, in bothering his confessor, in the light of what they both had wrong.

Rome taught that justification before God was not wrought solely on the basis of Christ's merit, and received solely through faith in His Gospel. On this basis, Luther knew that he never really had peace with God, because his transgressions were not covered.

Then, Luther discovered the Gospel.

Once he laid hold on THIS - "all heaven broke loose".

"Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
(Rom 5:1-5)

Rick said...

Brothers and sisters under the pelt,
I found a searchable, cut & pasteable copy of MOTT in PDF. It includes everything but index and afterward by HvB. It is a 700 page book so it would be cheaper to buy the print copy for about $12 now I think (what a country) than printing this one. In other words, it’s only useful to the serious searcher who has already paid their dues to Tarcher/Putnam.
Enjoy.

ximeze said...

Ricky
Did you notice it's tagged


Tarot, magic, occult, magick, Occultism, divination




Oy Vey

Rick said...

Don't know what that means. Can't return it?

:-)

Jerry said...

Some people just like to say salsa.

Some people just like to say tarot.

Rick said...

I was going to scan it till I found supah-fresh-sideways-hat-boy did it for me, yo.

Rick said...

In yesterday’s list of the vanishing Transdimensional Orderlies, I forgot to recognize, Dilys and Will.
Remember GLASR and his salute?
:~)

Van Harvey said...

Gagdad said "Part of the problem is that leftism suppresses greatness of character and nobility of soul from the earliest age."

Yep. Imagination being one of their key targets. Don't be fooled by their pretences of faux imaginative preenings - what they inevitably mean is 'fanciful' which means random, chaotic, silly. Truly imaginative pursuits were among the first things banished from the classroom in games and books - the favorite catch-alls of 'too competitive', 'selfish', 'chauvinistic', deployed en masse.

In place of Aesop, we got "See Dick & Jane", in place of C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, Nathaniel Hawthorne or Frances Hodgson Burnett, we get... pathetically flat slap dash crap that makes 'Dora da explorah' seem well ploted.

Double ugh.

Job asked "...how does a Reagan make the choice to play in that field at all??? "

I don't know about someone on a higher level like that, but I suspect it's not too far from what keeps most of us going - our children (Human or visionary). Sometimes it's hard to imagine why the hell else you shouldn't just pack it in and head for a nice cave somewhere to pretend you wouldn't miss our modern necessities.

Gagdad Bob said...

Searches of the Day:

7 Reasons Men Shouldn't Cry truthpaste tv

3 idiots wallpapers

nosepiercing big nose

cartoons with blowtorch

hasselhoff wallpaper

Rick said...

That's funny. I typed in “MacGyver episodes” and got the same thing.

Gagdad Bob said...

New Dr. Zero.

ximeze said...

Boeing Advanced Tactical Laser Defeats Ground Target in Flight Test

Kewl

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

But most people live in a world of trivia and drama. There is no real movement (except downward), only agitation."

Man, you ain't just whistlin' Dixie there.
It's sure no fun getting sucked up into those, which is one reason I'm not big on family reunions and the like.

I have selective empathy on my empathy meter.
The trivial n' dramatic ain't on it.

Skully said...

I have empathy, but it's entirely relative to the amount of grog the agitator brings along.

Of course, I do have some strict crytearia that even grog won't change as snivelling lefties often learn.

Skully don't suffer fools gladly, he makes 'em suffer.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Hi Bob!

Thanks for the clip. It was well worth the download.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Rick-

GLASR is still around, although he goes by Doux, now. I still get e-mails sometimes, and see him make a comment every so often, although not here for quite awhile.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Speaking of empathy, one thing I learned the hard way is you don't want a reputation for being a "good listener."

Not that everything I listened to was trivial whining, but most...well, was.

If you ever get coined with the moniker of "good listener" consider it a curse.
Oh, you might feel good about it for a time, but that'll quickly pass.

Rick said...

Thanks, Ben.

Hey, I figured out why Gippy and Rack haven't been by.

Hold up to mirror:
(.krowemoh hcum ooT)

Anonymous said...

Good Post, Bob. The inadvisability of worry and anxiety is well taken. Not so easy to implement, but your input helps to ease the mind.

You also wrote, regarding your loss of interest in performing psychotherapy:
"But I have quite literally lost my ability to empathize with most human problems. You just have no idea of the sorts of peripheral things the rank-and-foul worry about. Perhaps you do, since you no doubt have relatives. Their lives are entirely beside the point."

Earlier in this blog we discussed the types of relationships racoons can/should have with non-racoons, and the general consensus was that raccoons generally have a beneficial impact on non-raccoons, beneficial meaning advancing the cause of moving humanity up on the vertical scale.

Your training as a psychotherapist places you in a position to influence non-raccoons very directly, a valuable resource.

You don't have to actually deliver conventional psychotherapy during your sessions; you can hijack the process and convert it to raccoon work.

The slightest bit of darkness you can chip off another soul is off a huge benefit to the entire world.

Physical proximity to a raccoon alone can have an effect so the words used in these sessions are of the highest importance.

Something to think about.

Rick said...

Bob's current Bobness seems more genuine.
I doubt I'd be here if I felt manipulated at all.
The place isn't just called One Cosmos. He applies, offers, everything he knows.

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