Here's your weekly rewordgitation from two years past. "Spiritual insanity" will no doubt sound polemical to some, but I mean it quite literally and matter-of-factly, since it should go without saying that one who denies or distorts the reality of spirit is by definition spiritually insane. Or, to turn it around, if the radical secularists and metaphysical Darwinists are correct, then our knowledge and experience of spirit merely represent a kind of stubborn pathology that cannot possibly be valid. Being that "loss of reality testing" is the sine qua non of mental illness, we can't both be sane.
*****
I went down Virginia, seekin' shelter from the storm
Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower grow
Five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain --John Fogerty, Who'll Stop the Rain
I suppose what bothers me most about the left except for the bad hygiene is that it institutionalizes man's fall and reverses the cosmic order. This order can be known with the higher intellect, which is why "job one" of leftism is always the elimination of the intellect properly so-called. Leftism is intrinsically anti-intellectual, in that it must abolish that part of man which is capable of seeing the error of leftism in a direct and unmediated way.
In fact, a major part of the leftist agenda involves displacing the higher mind by the lower, that is, "small r" reason in its mechanical sense. Worse than the ideological takeover of academia has been the simultaneous eclipse of the higher mind, thus reducing man to a cultured beast.
The leftist program follows the split in the western world which occurred with the Enlightenment, which had its radical version in France and its skeptical version in England and Scotland. America has been by far the most successful nation in history because it was a product of the skeptical Enlightenment (i.e., classical liberals such as Adam Smith) and because our founders -- since they were so securely anchored in Judeo-Christian metaphysics and therefore "innoculated" against leftism -- categorically rejected the savagely utopian schemes of the romantic radicals.
Now, all purely secular philosophies that exclude the vertical are more or less error a grandiose scale, but at least most of these philosophies do not include -- as part of their intrinsic philosophy -- the imposition of their philosophy on everyone else. The whole point about being a classically liberal conservative is that it preserves at its very heart the right of anyone to reject it. It doesn't impose anything on anyone, which is what is so ironic about paranoid leftists who constantly fantasize about the imminent Christian fascist takeover! [Gee, how did that turn out, anyway?]
The pneumapathology at the heart of leftism always includes acting out, which is one of the more primitive defense mechanisms, as it bypasses thought altogether and replaces it with action. This is why leftist intellectuals are always activists, which simply means that they are more concerned with changing the world than understanding it. The gargantuan Generational Theft Act of 2009 is a case in point. Our children's children's children will be paying for this liberal interest group smash-and-grab legislation for the rest of their lives. (As Lucianne put it, The first terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11.)
Naturally, classical liberals have no objection to change, but only so long as the change is rooted in understanding, including especially an understanding of human nature. For if your understanding of human nature is faulty or grossly incomplete, then your political philosophy is going to be nothing less than a disaster. The disaster may happen quickly or it may slowly unfold with time, but the disaster is inevitable.
Anyone who lives in error eventually receives sharp blows from the world. But another purpose of leftism is to rescue people from the disasters caused by leftism, thus ensuring a steady stream of people to rescue, and therefore a greater need for the left. In short, the purpose of the left is to fail, as its success is built on the wreckage of its own failures. Its very foundation is failure, through which it gains more power, and the accumulation of power can be the only end for a half-animal who has rejected the vertical for the horizontal.
A couple of days ago while driving to work I was listening to Air America and caught a bit of the abysmally tedious program of professional unfunnyman Al Franken. The guest was a gold-plated leftist bull-goose paranoiac, Joe Conason, who has published a new cry for help with the harrowing title, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush!!! The shrill and paranoid title is just a measure of how free of irony the left has become -- as if we didn't just have a freaking election a couple of months ago that effectively undermines Conason's entire thesis. But reality is hardly a consideration for the reality-based community. As any competent psychologist can tell you, truth is irrelevant when someone has an emotional need to believe in its alternatives.
Conason's unintentionally ironic title is a takeoff on uber-moonbat Sinclair Lewis' 1935 screed, It Can't Happen Here. Lewis is revered by contemporary moonbats for his boneheaded dailykosian remark that "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Brilliant! Sean Penn couldn't have said it better! As always, the left confuses hysteria with "courage" or "insight," so that Lewis stands in a long line of courageous leftists such as Cindy Sheehan and Al Franken who don't speak "truth to power" but excitedly bark at their own psychological projections.
Like all leftists, Lewis seems to have merely externalized his own existential misery and called it a political philosophy. I can't say I know much about his personal life, but his Wikipedia entry is instructive: "Alcohol played a dominant role in his life; he died of advanced alcoholism in Rome." If so, we can be fairly certain that Lewis was 1) miserable, 2) weak, 3) a slave who was not psychologically mature enough to handle spiritual liberty and who squandered his own, and therefore 4) in need of a political system to save himself from himself. Please feel free to correct me if he wasn't a total idiot, but I have never been drawn to didactic "realist" literature. Exterior reality can speak for itself, and doesn't require "artists" to represent it. Rather, the artist reveals the interior of the exterior.
All leftists must know that somewhere deep inside, beneath the histrionic bluster, they are weak, dependent, envious, racist, and so on, because they wish to impose a political system on those of us who do not have those particular problems. If you are not envious, you don't give much thought to CEOs who earn more money than you do. If you are not a racist, it doesn't occur to you that Barack Obama is half white, nor would you ever conceive the sinister idea that the Constitution mandates racial discrimination or equates a human fetus with a decayed tooth. If you love women, you would not be drawn to the loathsome philosophy of radical feminism; etc.
The description of Conason's book on amazon sounds like it is taken from the nursing notes of a recent psychiatric hospitalization for acute paranoia:
"Despite recent election, patient still believes America in great danger. Hopeless re future. Doubts existence of democracy. Government conspiring with 'big business' and 'big evangelism.' Asked him 'what about big entertainment, big media, big labor, big education and big trial lawyers?,' but patient incorporated me into paranoid delusions. 'You're just part of Big Health! You're not helping me! You only care about bottom line!, etc.' Obsessed with nameless ideologues and religious zealots 'attacking logic' and 'scientific method.' Asked patient if he meant Al Gore -- became extremely hostile. Incoherent babbling: 'ruling party encourages xenophobic nationalism based on irrational, manufactured fear.' Confusing -- asked him if he meant irrational manufactured fear of Bush. Patient became agitated -- required sedation and restraints. Carotid veins visible, face flushed like Howard Dean, screaming something about 'party in power seeks perpetual state of war to maintain power -- willing to lie, cheat, and steal to achieve ends.' Empathically suggest to him can't happen here. More agitation -- 'it can happen here, damn you! My 'book' says so -- select group of extremely powerful right-wing ideologues driving us ever closer to precipice, etc., etc., etc.' Intravenous push of thorazine; patient now watching Keith Olbermann and quietly mumbling to self."
At American Thinker there is an article entitled Cultural Marxism that demonstrates how Marxism hardly died with the dramatic fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. As it so happens, Raccoon lore maintains that leftism can trace its squalid genealogy all the way back to the origin of mankind. For the "fall of mankind" was specifically a rejection of the divine-cosmic order (and partnership) in favor of a wholly man-made one. This lesson is reinforced time and again in scripture (and its shadow in the herebelow, history), as man repeats his fall, 32 feet per second per second, and suffers the ineveateapple consequences.
Kimball traces the various permutations of the leftist mind parasite which, like all parasites, knows how to survive. Although the "New Left" of the 1960's collapsed and fell apart, it simply underwent what I would call an "interior diaspora" into various ideologies that all have roots in the same infrahuman ideological swamp: leftist "revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have, for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay' rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network..., the ACLU, People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States..., and Code Pink for Peace."
This is why if you attack leftism frontally, it will simply mutate into all of these other viruses. The only way to effectively confront it is from "above" and "below." In other words, its common root must be attacked at its base, but only from a higher psychospiritual perspective. Their strategy is to "divide themselves" in order to conquer us, so the solution must be a unified theory of the left, so we can apprehend the one beast beneath all of its pseudo-diversity.
As Kimball notes, neo-Marxism thrives partly because it has mutated into various superficially appealing code words such as "tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity." All of these words and phrases imply one thing but actually mean the opposite -- i.e., tolerance is intolerance, social justice is economic tyranny, sex education is the re-barbarization of sexuality, diversity is uniformity, sensitivity is a censorship of unwanted truth, etc.
Kimball goes into the intellectual history of Marxism, noting its intrinsic hostility to the Christianized West. If Marxism is to succeed, then the Christian West must fall. It is an either-or proposition: the West must be "de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a 'long march through the culture.' The new battleground... must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top."
One of the most important points raised by Kimball is that, for the left to succeed, "intellectual firepower was required: a theory to pathologize what was to be destroyed." As such, "Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family create a character prone to racism and fascism. Thus, anyone who upholds America's traditional moral values and institutions is both racist and fascist." The human being is "but a soulless animal," so it naturally follows that contingent existence (or existential contingencies such as skin color) determines essence, rather than vice versa. Again, this is a complete rejection and reversal of the cosmic order upon which the American founders based our government.
And so we come full circle to Joe Conason raving in his hospital bed and chaneling the paranoid alcoholic Sinclair Lewis in the Al Franken nuthouse. An empathic and disinterested psychoanalyst would deal with Conason by respectfully acknowledging the urgency of his concerns and reflecting back to him an innocent but loaded observation, such as "I hear what you're saying. An extremely frightening and hostile force is trying to take over your world. Let's stand back a bit and try to understand who or what this force could be, shall we?"
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT
I wonder what they meant --Leonard Cohen, The Future
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Friday, February 06, 2009
From Egocentric to Cosmocentric
[T]he contradiction of wanting to be... the whole of reality and one's own self... is transcended first and foremost in Christ... --Balthasar
A few more thoughts on Soloviev before returning to where we were a few days ago, back in volume one. (And you folks should be grateful that I'm making my way through these dense volumes on your bewhole; it's quite a slog!)
I'm pleased to see that Soloviev highlights the importance of the individual to the cosmic spiritual economy, because this is again something that tends to be devalued among those who emphasize the obliteration of the ego. In other words, they conflate "ego" with "individual," which legitimizes either a state of boundaryless blobhood or a hypernarcissistic denial of one's hypernarcissism.
Most of the new-age gurus fall into the latter category (if they aren't borderline sociopaths like a Deepak or Tony Robbins). The blob-types tend to be those who can't tolerate the rigors of of mature functioning (like having a job), and therefore take refuge in a detached, prepersonal cloud of "spirit," while the narcissistic types always require "disciples," which keeps alive the dialectic of their fantasized superiority, which is simultaneously overwrought and brittle.
I suppose one must begin with the question, "just what is the proper role of individuation in the psychic economy?" Of Soloviev, Balthasar writes that "for him it is precisely the personal that is truly and properly 'ideal,' while, conversely, that which is purely generic and anonymous is assigned to matter." Therefore, to deny the individual is to negate one of the highest expressions -- a miracle, really -- of the divine creativity. What seems like an "ascent" into spirit can actually be a regression into matter, if it means tossing aside this divine gift of a unique self.
One critical concern is the very real danger of spiritual inflation that necessarily attaches to the individual. Thus, at every stage of the ascent, an attitude of deep humility is both the seed and fruit, for no one who begins to apprehend the contours of the Divine can possibly retain his grandiosity and hubris. Thus the well-known "paradox" -- which isn't really a paradox at all -- that those most aware of their sinful nature are the saints. In a certain sense, the higher you go, the smaller you get. Conversely, the lower you descend, the more inflated you become.
Think of Queeg, whose contemptuous superiority is sealed by his profound ignorance of both science and spirit. That is the bad kind of individuality. And what makes it bad? First, it is a caricature of individuality, because it exists in a stunted, reactionary, and especially closed form.
In other words, no one who is in a "vertically open" state (↑↓) could possibly maintain such a cramped and desiccated worldview. Such a person must literally die to spirit in order to "live" as a metaphysical Darwinist. In turn, his "self" can only be identified with matter -- for with what else could it be identified? -- which makes him a kind of generic character, superficial and worthless eccentricities notwithstanding. There is no uniqueness about him, just a bundle of horizontal reactions. This is the madness that results from believing that Darwin has counted every hair on your head.
In contrast, God loves people. Real people. But that presupposes "being" or "becoming" real, doesn't it? Now, all Raccoons will have pondered the fact that there are certain people with whom you walk away and say to yourself, "damn, now that's a real person." But what does that mean? Is it just a figure of speech, or is it an actual observation, albeit of a higher dimensional reality?
Obviously the latter. The real person has many subtle-but-obvious characteristics which can certainly be detected with cOOnvision (and scent), but can also sometimes even be literally seen (i.e., the "glow worm" effect). What are these characteristics? To a certain extent I touched on them on pp. 221-224 of the Coonifesto. Since I probably wrote that passage a decade ago, it might be interesting to review it to see if any of it still holds holy water.
Let's see. We begin with an observation by Unknown Friend, who says that "Real contact with the spiritual world always engenders the influx of forces." This is the grace or the subtle force, symbolized by (↓).
By the way, I often get emails from people, essentially asking "what's the secret," and as far as I'm concerned, that's it. Surrender + Grace is the only path I know. As Aurobindo wrote, once we enter this state, our "old predetermined destiny [I would say "fate"] begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, a Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities in his nature."
Amen to that. How could I, on my own, ever lift myself by my own buddhastraps beyond my present possibilities? I tried. I couldn't. If others can, go for it. But it is not the Raccoon Way.
Another important point is that while (↓) is (super)naturally ubiquitous, we must become conscious of it; we must prepare ourselves both to be worthy of receiving it and able to detect it when it comes. Here I might compare it to Polanyi's description of scientific discovery, which seems to be "guided," as it were, by a subtle intuition of an approaching breakthrough -- as if the future can cast its shadow back into the present.
I would say that the same applies to O. How can you know when you are "near" it? I think by something analogous. However, how it specifically manifests will partly depend upon how it is "inflected" through the lens of the individual. For example, for me, when I write these posts, I am clearly non-trying to enter that receptive space in which I conform myself to O. I'm definitely not "thinking" in the usual sense, just trying to "amplify" a kind of flow between O and (¶). And when it's really working, I hope it comes out in a way that is simultaneously universal even while being individual.
Now normally, one would think that those two categories would be mutually exclusive. For example, a valid scientific theory can only be universal, and must be cleansed of its individuality. Not so with the realm of Spirit. This is because physics describes a relatively simple reality consisting of only four dimensions, whereas the self abides in a bi-logical space that transcends but includes the world of physics (and from which the world of physics is a declension).
Here again, think of Christianity: the ultimate truth is a function of Word + flesh, of the ultimate universal being inflected through a particular human being. But is Jesus a generic son of a nobodaddy? Hardly! He is a quite vivid somebody and somabuddhi, a unique individual with a distinct manner of expressing himself and idiom all his own. He is not some anonymous sage spouting platitudes, nor is he a post-personal blob of holy goo. And frankly, he wouldn't mean anything to us if he weren't such a man. Which is why Petey says, Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job!
Here is a quote by Smoley from my book. It could hardly be more accurate:
"[Y]our whole body and soul are merely a sort of telescope through which something much larger and wiser and more powerful is peering out at the world. As such a realization grows and deepens, you may increasingly sense that you know certain things without knowing how you know them. You begin to have access to the knowledge that is common to the whole human race."
Think about the profound changes that occurred in you the first time you fell in love and became a deeply open system on the horizontal plane. Now, apply that same idea to the vertical plane. When we become open to the Divine, what is the result? Let's see, "lightness" of being, innocence, transparency, spontaneity, and simplicity, to which I might add presence, "flow," gratitude, humility, and a lot of why me?!, i.e., ongoing repentance and metanoia.
Also, I've noticed that figure and ground tend to be reversed, so that one lives from the inside out and top down, which results in a sense that time is leisurely flowing out from a center of eternity, instead of just "rushing by" and hurtling us toward our doom. In short, one becomes a "mode of the infinite," emphasis on both.
A few more thoughts on Soloviev before returning to where we were a few days ago, back in volume one. (And you folks should be grateful that I'm making my way through these dense volumes on your bewhole; it's quite a slog!)
I'm pleased to see that Soloviev highlights the importance of the individual to the cosmic spiritual economy, because this is again something that tends to be devalued among those who emphasize the obliteration of the ego. In other words, they conflate "ego" with "individual," which legitimizes either a state of boundaryless blobhood or a hypernarcissistic denial of one's hypernarcissism.
Most of the new-age gurus fall into the latter category (if they aren't borderline sociopaths like a Deepak or Tony Robbins). The blob-types tend to be those who can't tolerate the rigors of of mature functioning (like having a job), and therefore take refuge in a detached, prepersonal cloud of "spirit," while the narcissistic types always require "disciples," which keeps alive the dialectic of their fantasized superiority, which is simultaneously overwrought and brittle.
I suppose one must begin with the question, "just what is the proper role of individuation in the psychic economy?" Of Soloviev, Balthasar writes that "for him it is precisely the personal that is truly and properly 'ideal,' while, conversely, that which is purely generic and anonymous is assigned to matter." Therefore, to deny the individual is to negate one of the highest expressions -- a miracle, really -- of the divine creativity. What seems like an "ascent" into spirit can actually be a regression into matter, if it means tossing aside this divine gift of a unique self.
One critical concern is the very real danger of spiritual inflation that necessarily attaches to the individual. Thus, at every stage of the ascent, an attitude of deep humility is both the seed and fruit, for no one who begins to apprehend the contours of the Divine can possibly retain his grandiosity and hubris. Thus the well-known "paradox" -- which isn't really a paradox at all -- that those most aware of their sinful nature are the saints. In a certain sense, the higher you go, the smaller you get. Conversely, the lower you descend, the more inflated you become.
Think of Queeg, whose contemptuous superiority is sealed by his profound ignorance of both science and spirit. That is the bad kind of individuality. And what makes it bad? First, it is a caricature of individuality, because it exists in a stunted, reactionary, and especially closed form.
In other words, no one who is in a "vertically open" state (↑↓) could possibly maintain such a cramped and desiccated worldview. Such a person must literally die to spirit in order to "live" as a metaphysical Darwinist. In turn, his "self" can only be identified with matter -- for with what else could it be identified? -- which makes him a kind of generic character, superficial and worthless eccentricities notwithstanding. There is no uniqueness about him, just a bundle of horizontal reactions. This is the madness that results from believing that Darwin has counted every hair on your head.
In contrast, God loves people. Real people. But that presupposes "being" or "becoming" real, doesn't it? Now, all Raccoons will have pondered the fact that there are certain people with whom you walk away and say to yourself, "damn, now that's a real person." But what does that mean? Is it just a figure of speech, or is it an actual observation, albeit of a higher dimensional reality?
Obviously the latter. The real person has many subtle-but-obvious characteristics which can certainly be detected with cOOnvision (and scent), but can also sometimes even be literally seen (i.e., the "glow worm" effect). What are these characteristics? To a certain extent I touched on them on pp. 221-224 of the Coonifesto. Since I probably wrote that passage a decade ago, it might be interesting to review it to see if any of it still holds holy water.
Let's see. We begin with an observation by Unknown Friend, who says that "Real contact with the spiritual world always engenders the influx of forces." This is the grace or the subtle force, symbolized by (↓).
By the way, I often get emails from people, essentially asking "what's the secret," and as far as I'm concerned, that's it. Surrender + Grace is the only path I know. As Aurobindo wrote, once we enter this state, our "old predetermined destiny [I would say "fate"] begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, a Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities in his nature."
Amen to that. How could I, on my own, ever lift myself by my own buddhastraps beyond my present possibilities? I tried. I couldn't. If others can, go for it. But it is not the Raccoon Way.
Another important point is that while (↓) is (super)naturally ubiquitous, we must become conscious of it; we must prepare ourselves both to be worthy of receiving it and able to detect it when it comes. Here I might compare it to Polanyi's description of scientific discovery, which seems to be "guided," as it were, by a subtle intuition of an approaching breakthrough -- as if the future can cast its shadow back into the present.
I would say that the same applies to O. How can you know when you are "near" it? I think by something analogous. However, how it specifically manifests will partly depend upon how it is "inflected" through the lens of the individual. For example, for me, when I write these posts, I am clearly non-trying to enter that receptive space in which I conform myself to O. I'm definitely not "thinking" in the usual sense, just trying to "amplify" a kind of flow between O and (¶). And when it's really working, I hope it comes out in a way that is simultaneously universal even while being individual.
Now normally, one would think that those two categories would be mutually exclusive. For example, a valid scientific theory can only be universal, and must be cleansed of its individuality. Not so with the realm of Spirit. This is because physics describes a relatively simple reality consisting of only four dimensions, whereas the self abides in a bi-logical space that transcends but includes the world of physics (and from which the world of physics is a declension).
Here again, think of Christianity: the ultimate truth is a function of Word + flesh, of the ultimate universal being inflected through a particular human being. But is Jesus a generic son of a nobodaddy? Hardly! He is a quite vivid somebody and somabuddhi, a unique individual with a distinct manner of expressing himself and idiom all his own. He is not some anonymous sage spouting platitudes, nor is he a post-personal blob of holy goo. And frankly, he wouldn't mean anything to us if he weren't such a man. Which is why Petey says, Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job!
Here is a quote by Smoley from my book. It could hardly be more accurate:
"[Y]our whole body and soul are merely a sort of telescope through which something much larger and wiser and more powerful is peering out at the world. As such a realization grows and deepens, you may increasingly sense that you know certain things without knowing how you know them. You begin to have access to the knowledge that is common to the whole human race."
Think about the profound changes that occurred in you the first time you fell in love and became a deeply open system on the horizontal plane. Now, apply that same idea to the vertical plane. When we become open to the Divine, what is the result? Let's see, "lightness" of being, innocence, transparency, spontaneity, and simplicity, to which I might add presence, "flow," gratitude, humility, and a lot of why me?!, i.e., ongoing repentance and metanoia.
Also, I've noticed that figure and ground tend to be reversed, so that one lives from the inside out and top down, which results in a sense that time is leisurely flowing out from a center of eternity, instead of just "rushing by" and hurtling us toward our doom. In short, one becomes a "mode of the infinite," emphasis on both.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Antichrist vs. Antimarx
As I mentioned yesterday, the later Soloviev tempered his optimystic side with some more sober pessimysticism. While the cosmos would eventually be deified, it first had to make it through the gauntlet of various opposing forces in the world. But instead of "unifying," or "integrating," these forces, it would be as if these opposing forces would be dramatically heightened and finally "revealed in all their contradictoriness." As you may have noticed, this is something our Minister of Docrinal Enforcement often brings up, which means there's a good chance there's something to it.
I don't want to be like one of those guys who is constantly predicting the apocalypse, or second coming of Toots, or X-day, but one can't help thinking of the way things are going here in the United States.
For example, I can remember back, say, in the mid-1970's, when it seemed as if it was the end of ideological division, since everyone (at least everyone I knew) was pretty much on the same page except for maybe a few right wing religious kooks (who back then actually supported the "born again" Carter!) and National Review subscribers. Then, within just a few years, the left wing anti-antichrist appeared, Ronulus Maximus, which brought out an extraordinarily deep and essentially unbridgeable cultural divide that the left will never stop resenting.
Likewise, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for awhile as if we might even have reached the "end of history," in the sense that it was finally settled that history was inevitably moving in the slackward direction of individualism, liberal democracy, and free markets. Oops. Islamic supremacy and the resurgence of the lunatic left but the kibosh on that fantasy. Not to mention the Chinese hybrid model that combines free market capitalism with authoritarian control.
So now it seems that the world-historical outlines are more stark than ever. I have nothing whatsoever in common with a dailykos reader, Air America listener, or New York Times subscriber. Seriously, we might as well be a different species. Furthemore, I see no possibilty of reconciliation, because our first principles are completely and irrevocably at odds with theirs, and one doesn't compromise on first principles.
Which in turn is why the idea of Obama being "bipartisan" or a "uniter" is pure fantasy. Already, in just two weeks, we see that George Bush was far more of a uniter than Barry & crew. After all, did George Bush ever propose anything which every single Democrat voted against? Maybe he did, but I can't remember one. Despite all the hysteria, the war has remained bipartisan, in that congress has to keep appropriating the money. FISA passed easily, as did the Patriot Act. Rendition will continue, as will "torture," except now the press will call it "vigorous interrogation." Etc.
Blah blah blah. My only point is that the divisions in the country are as sharp as ever -- as sharp as the difference between the children of earth and the children of Light. Which Soloviev would probably say is the whole point, for "the ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God," but "pass by way of the final unveiling of the Antichrist, who conceals himself under the last mask to be stripped away, the mask of what is good and what is Christian."
Now, as you know, my preference is always to "demythologize" -- or at least unsaturate -- these things and look for the deeper principles they instantiate. I'm not saying it is the correct way, but it may be the more effective way, because as soon as you mention "Antichrist," it's pretty much of a conversation killer. Most people will dismiss you out of hand, while the rest will assume you mean it in the way they do. In short, the word has become too saturated to serve as a basis for exploration and thought, at least in terms of communicating novel insights. Which is why I prefer abstract symbols such as O and Ø. As outlined in my book, O is to (¶) as Ø is to (•) -- or more likely, (•••), i.e., a person with either no center or multiple centers.
Looked at this way, evil is not just a "lack" or "absence." Ultimately it is that, but it nevertheless takes on an ontological weight here in Middle Earth, since it "metabolizes" people and ideas, and therefore seems to grow (which it does). And as it grows, its mass produces a "spiritual gravity" that continues to draw people into its circular obit, where they "die to heaven" -- the opposite movement of the spiritual person who "dies to the world." And once that happens, you have a "creature of the Antichrist," so to speak, or someone who has been "born again" from below.
You will have noticed that not only are these people different from us, but they draw nourishment from a different source, which ensures that the demon they harbor will continue to grow. Specifically, they draw their nourishment from "the world," plus several gradations below that. These gradations are not "real" -- i.e., they are not a true part of the cosmic hierarchy, but are analogous to "false angels," or what we might call "collective mind parasites." That monster that the Islamic supremacists worship is a fine example, but the left also has its lowerarchy of demon-angels that a normal person simply does not comprehend -- in particular, why they should be in any way respected, let alone enforced by the bullies of political correctness.
(Here, check out this bizarre but typical example of a leftwing religious service. Yes, it's hilarious, until you realize that this diabolical ideology has completely penetrated academia. Note that this is literally the death of education -- and therefore its sufficient reason, the search for Truth -- and its replacement with a parasitic double. It literally prevents the possibility of pure thought breaking through into Being, and actually turns thought into an infectious spiritual illness. Colleges become centers of disease incubation and propagation, like the bathhouses of San Francisco or Barney Frank's basement.)
This will only sound polemical to people who already have the disease. To the rest of you, it will sound quite matter-of-fact. Not only that, but I think you'll find that the left describes us in the identical way. Examples are far too numerous to mention, but one thinks of Bill Moyers referring to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as "political porn." Websites such as dailykos and huffpo are nothing more than unbound hatred given form by a fantasied projection of conservatism. And there is no need for a troll to leave a comment to the effect that I represent "unbound hatred given form by a fantasied projection of leftism," because we already know you feel that way. Let's just stipulate that only one of us can be correct.
One of the persistent metaphysical errors that assures the dysfunction of the left is the absurd elevation of matter to the ultimate ground of reality. Once this is done, then there is no way to adjudicate between competing ideas of reality, so it becomes easy to latch onto an abstract ideal, such as Marxism, and proceed to superimpose it on reality. In other words, the leftist lurches between bonehead materialism and hamhanded idealism in a completely incoherent way.
At risk of belaboring the pain, only Christianity gives birth to a (the) unity of idealism and materialism at a higher level, which is what the United States is supposed to be about in practice, what with the harmonious interplay of free markets operating within the boundary conditions of Judeo-Christian principles. Not surprisingly, the left attacks and undermines both, which can only result in decadence and dysfunction: the realm of Ø.
Furthermore, the doctrine of multiculturalism is a direct attack on the spiritual unity of Man, for man can only be unified on a spiritual level. Instead, the left wants to unify man on a material level, for example, by stealing from some people in order to give money away to people who don't even pay taxes, under the guise of "equality." But if equality is only material equality, it not only destroys the realm of spirit, but ensures tyranny: the tyranny of the takers over the makers and parasites over their hosts.
Oops. Out of time. See you tomorrow.
I don't want to be like one of those guys who is constantly predicting the apocalypse, or second coming of Toots, or X-day, but one can't help thinking of the way things are going here in the United States.
For example, I can remember back, say, in the mid-1970's, when it seemed as if it was the end of ideological division, since everyone (at least everyone I knew) was pretty much on the same page except for maybe a few right wing religious kooks (who back then actually supported the "born again" Carter!) and National Review subscribers. Then, within just a few years, the left wing anti-antichrist appeared, Ronulus Maximus, which brought out an extraordinarily deep and essentially unbridgeable cultural divide that the left will never stop resenting.
Likewise, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for awhile as if we might even have reached the "end of history," in the sense that it was finally settled that history was inevitably moving in the slackward direction of individualism, liberal democracy, and free markets. Oops. Islamic supremacy and the resurgence of the lunatic left but the kibosh on that fantasy. Not to mention the Chinese hybrid model that combines free market capitalism with authoritarian control.
So now it seems that the world-historical outlines are more stark than ever. I have nothing whatsoever in common with a dailykos reader, Air America listener, or New York Times subscriber. Seriously, we might as well be a different species. Furthemore, I see no possibilty of reconciliation, because our first principles are completely and irrevocably at odds with theirs, and one doesn't compromise on first principles.
Which in turn is why the idea of Obama being "bipartisan" or a "uniter" is pure fantasy. Already, in just two weeks, we see that George Bush was far more of a uniter than Barry & crew. After all, did George Bush ever propose anything which every single Democrat voted against? Maybe he did, but I can't remember one. Despite all the hysteria, the war has remained bipartisan, in that congress has to keep appropriating the money. FISA passed easily, as did the Patriot Act. Rendition will continue, as will "torture," except now the press will call it "vigorous interrogation." Etc.
Blah blah blah. My only point is that the divisions in the country are as sharp as ever -- as sharp as the difference between the children of earth and the children of Light. Which Soloviev would probably say is the whole point, for "the ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God," but "pass by way of the final unveiling of the Antichrist, who conceals himself under the last mask to be stripped away, the mask of what is good and what is Christian."
Now, as you know, my preference is always to "demythologize" -- or at least unsaturate -- these things and look for the deeper principles they instantiate. I'm not saying it is the correct way, but it may be the more effective way, because as soon as you mention "Antichrist," it's pretty much of a conversation killer. Most people will dismiss you out of hand, while the rest will assume you mean it in the way they do. In short, the word has become too saturated to serve as a basis for exploration and thought, at least in terms of communicating novel insights. Which is why I prefer abstract symbols such as O and Ø. As outlined in my book, O is to (¶) as Ø is to (•) -- or more likely, (•••), i.e., a person with either no center or multiple centers.
Looked at this way, evil is not just a "lack" or "absence." Ultimately it is that, but it nevertheless takes on an ontological weight here in Middle Earth, since it "metabolizes" people and ideas, and therefore seems to grow (which it does). And as it grows, its mass produces a "spiritual gravity" that continues to draw people into its circular obit, where they "die to heaven" -- the opposite movement of the spiritual person who "dies to the world." And once that happens, you have a "creature of the Antichrist," so to speak, or someone who has been "born again" from below.
You will have noticed that not only are these people different from us, but they draw nourishment from a different source, which ensures that the demon they harbor will continue to grow. Specifically, they draw their nourishment from "the world," plus several gradations below that. These gradations are not "real" -- i.e., they are not a true part of the cosmic hierarchy, but are analogous to "false angels," or what we might call "collective mind parasites." That monster that the Islamic supremacists worship is a fine example, but the left also has its lowerarchy of demon-angels that a normal person simply does not comprehend -- in particular, why they should be in any way respected, let alone enforced by the bullies of political correctness.
(Here, check out this bizarre but typical example of a leftwing religious service. Yes, it's hilarious, until you realize that this diabolical ideology has completely penetrated academia. Note that this is literally the death of education -- and therefore its sufficient reason, the search for Truth -- and its replacement with a parasitic double. It literally prevents the possibility of pure thought breaking through into Being, and actually turns thought into an infectious spiritual illness. Colleges become centers of disease incubation and propagation, like the bathhouses of San Francisco or Barney Frank's basement.)
This will only sound polemical to people who already have the disease. To the rest of you, it will sound quite matter-of-fact. Not only that, but I think you'll find that the left describes us in the identical way. Examples are far too numerous to mention, but one thinks of Bill Moyers referring to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as "political porn." Websites such as dailykos and huffpo are nothing more than unbound hatred given form by a fantasied projection of conservatism. And there is no need for a troll to leave a comment to the effect that I represent "unbound hatred given form by a fantasied projection of leftism," because we already know you feel that way. Let's just stipulate that only one of us can be correct.
One of the persistent metaphysical errors that assures the dysfunction of the left is the absurd elevation of matter to the ultimate ground of reality. Once this is done, then there is no way to adjudicate between competing ideas of reality, so it becomes easy to latch onto an abstract ideal, such as Marxism, and proceed to superimpose it on reality. In other words, the leftist lurches between bonehead materialism and hamhanded idealism in a completely incoherent way.
At risk of belaboring the pain, only Christianity gives birth to a (the) unity of idealism and materialism at a higher level, which is what the United States is supposed to be about in practice, what with the harmonious interplay of free markets operating within the boundary conditions of Judeo-Christian principles. Not surprisingly, the left attacks and undermines both, which can only result in decadence and dysfunction: the realm of Ø.
Furthermore, the doctrine of multiculturalism is a direct attack on the spiritual unity of Man, for man can only be unified on a spiritual level. Instead, the left wants to unify man on a material level, for example, by stealing from some people in order to give money away to people who don't even pay taxes, under the guise of "equality." But if equality is only material equality, it not only destroys the realm of spirit, but ensures tyranny: the tyranny of the takers over the makers and parasites over their hosts.
Oops. Out of time. See you tomorrow.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
God and His Jnâni Quest
The Boy woke up early at the same time I did, so I'm blogging under somewhat trying, and even three ring, circustances this morning. Let's see if we can get anywhere. (First of all, for those who don't know their sanskrit from a sand crab: Jnâna.)
Hmm. Return to our previously scheduled program, or continue with Soloviev? Magnus made a comment that is worth highlighting. He likes "the idea of the 'conquest of the nondivine,'", and sees "everything since the onset of the Big Bang (at least) as part of a relentless expansion of God into the void of utter nonexistence. First space and time, then matter, then life and mind etc., culminating with the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth (and the cosmos in general), until it is leavened all the way through and God is all in all, every bit of creation glowing with divine beauty, harmony and sheer rightness."
So is the creation ascending toward the divine, or is the divine coondescending toward the creation? I would suggest that they are ultimately the same movement looked at from different angles. God kenotically pours himself into creation, while we pour ourselves back into God, in a mutual surrender. But only if we are already partially divinized can we surrender at all.
Again, that is just one of the startling innovations of Christianity -- the idea that God "surrenders" and turns himself in to fallen man, in the hope of raising him up again. Our task is to surrender to the surrender, so to speak. As Balthasar describes it, "the divine and integral wholeness is answered from the side of created reality by a progressive integration into that integral wholeness," but not before the "glorious descent of Agape," which makes "humanity the object of God's quest." In contrast to the blues musicians of old, we have a heavenhound on our trail.
Magnus continues: "I may be wrong, though. There are only a few passages to this effect in the Bible, while there are chapter after chapter with threats of death and destruction and going on about how angry God is and [the] good reason He has for it. The conquest of the nondivine must be pretty hard work -- if not at the still center of the Godhead then certainly out here at the frontier (though I suppose some of us are more frontier than others...)"
Re God's "anger," elsewhere in The Glory of the Lord, Balthasar speaks of a progressive "demythologization" of God that occurs in the Old Testament, so that the God of Proverbs or Wisdom has quite a different character than the earlier, more anthropocentric depictions. Eventually Judaism is essentially completely cleansed of mythology, and develops a fully apophatic notion of the divine, to such an extent that this sacred cow can't even be uddered (i.e., G-d).
In turn, once the idea of God is completely demythologized -- or what we would call "unsaturated" -- the historical stage is set for God to appear as he is, as opposed to how we would like for him to be.
In other words, not only did God have to prepare a people for the divine descent, he had to create an "empty space," a literal void, a "higher nothingness" (which in a way parallels the original creatio ex nihilo). This is why Jesus' appearance was so unexpected (to say the least) and unprecedented (although in hindsight, we can see that there were hints and clues all along). Those who did nurture the idea of a specific messiah obviously didn't envision anything like Jesus. No one saw it coming in this particular form. Only after the fact did the apostles begin putting two and two together; or perhaps we should say three and one.
Also, as Magnus suggests, the divine descent is not the end, but only the beginning. And while in some sense the "victory" over matter is assured, this hardly means that it will be a smooth ride from here to the eshchaton.
Rather -- and I mentioned this in a comment yesterday -- it seems that the later Soloviev (1890-1900) was considerably more pessimystic than the early, more optimystic Soloviev (1873-1883), which is a good thing. While he never abandoned his Christocentric cosmic evolutionism, as he matured, he developed a much greater appreciation of the Hostile Forces that oppose the evolution, both individually and collectively. Balthasar feels this makes him a much deeper thinker than Teilhard, who had a fair amount of new-age fuzziness and happy talk about him. Teilhard definitely failed to appreciate the Dark Side.
This is also what elevates Soloviev above Hegel, as well as the upside-down Hegelians, i.e., the left. In the case of Hegel, his idea of the Absolute is far too abstract, and tends to blot out both the individual and the historical landscape, as if we are all just riding on the dialectic that inevitably returns us to Absolute Spirit.
And in the case of the left -- and we see this in an astonishingly immature form in the Obama cult -- people really believed that the election of this cunning and transparently mendacious politician would lead to some kind of "transformation of consciousness," or Deepak's "quantum leap in awareness." Please. Leftism can only create a heap of ants, not any true interior unity.
Here again, this emphasizes the importance of demythologizing the spiritual space, because if you don't, you will simply fill it with your own retrograde fantasies, as does the left. One would hope that no true conservative is foolish enough to believe that the evil in man can be transformed by electing this or that politician. If anything, a noble man such as Ronald Reagan only makes them hate that more fervently. The left despises nobility in all its forms, and nobility is one of the first fruits of Spirit. In reducing man to matter, they rob him of his nobility and try to make up for the loss with stolen goodies, thus plunging him further into the abyss.
The "principle of progress" can only be located in the individual, and only then because he is embedded in a deeper movement of "the evolution of nature towards man, of history towards Christ, and the Church toward the Kingdom of God in its completeness." Absent this movement, there is no progress, only agitation and change. Nor is there any true hope, only a counterfeit and reactionary hope that obscures their cosmic hopelessness.
Like me, it seems that Soloviev tried to playgiarize with everyone and everything in order to Bobtize the cosmos. Thus, "he fully appropriates" these sources for himself; "the muddy stream runs through him as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear, disinfected waters," so these sources might "live and breath... in an atmosphere of unqualified transparency and intelligibility."
Regarding mind parasites, Soloviev came to appreciate that "the forces of egotism are given to man not to be destroyed but to be transformed, just as God himself creates good out of evil. The dark 'ground' is constantly in need of being brought to illumination." Illuminate and eliminate, as Petey always says.
But the main point is that we do not escape from matter, but transform it: "Christianity sees material life as the necessary foundation for the realization of divine truth, the embodiment of divine spirit.... [I]t is only the acknowledgment of matter in its true significance that sets us free from actual slavish dependence upon it, from an involuntary materialism." Indeed, "so long as man does not feel material nature in himself and outside himself as something that is his own, something akin to him, he does not love it, and he is not yet free from it" (emphasis mine).
So real freedom is identified with love, but especially in the "sacred marriage of Heaven and earth," or the union "between the fully incarnate deity and divinized reality of the world." "Sophia is the eternal feminine in the world, the eternal object of God's love." In their eternal union, God and Sophia become "one flesh," or Theosophia (in its proper sense, not the brand name).
Again, this is why Christian wisdom is always embodied wisdom, not some abstract ideal that is imposed upon reality. No: "the understanding alone is in no way the organ by means of which we can know any actual reality. Such reality can be known only through genuine experience," i.e., O-->(n).
Hmm. Return to our previously scheduled program, or continue with Soloviev? Magnus made a comment that is worth highlighting. He likes "the idea of the 'conquest of the nondivine,'", and sees "everything since the onset of the Big Bang (at least) as part of a relentless expansion of God into the void of utter nonexistence. First space and time, then matter, then life and mind etc., culminating with the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth (and the cosmos in general), until it is leavened all the way through and God is all in all, every bit of creation glowing with divine beauty, harmony and sheer rightness."
So is the creation ascending toward the divine, or is the divine coondescending toward the creation? I would suggest that they are ultimately the same movement looked at from different angles. God kenotically pours himself into creation, while we pour ourselves back into God, in a mutual surrender. But only if we are already partially divinized can we surrender at all.
Again, that is just one of the startling innovations of Christianity -- the idea that God "surrenders" and turns himself in to fallen man, in the hope of raising him up again. Our task is to surrender to the surrender, so to speak. As Balthasar describes it, "the divine and integral wholeness is answered from the side of created reality by a progressive integration into that integral wholeness," but not before the "glorious descent of Agape," which makes "humanity the object of God's quest." In contrast to the blues musicians of old, we have a heavenhound on our trail.
Magnus continues: "I may be wrong, though. There are only a few passages to this effect in the Bible, while there are chapter after chapter with threats of death and destruction and going on about how angry God is and [the] good reason He has for it. The conquest of the nondivine must be pretty hard work -- if not at the still center of the Godhead then certainly out here at the frontier (though I suppose some of us are more frontier than others...)"
Re God's "anger," elsewhere in The Glory of the Lord, Balthasar speaks of a progressive "demythologization" of God that occurs in the Old Testament, so that the God of Proverbs or Wisdom has quite a different character than the earlier, more anthropocentric depictions. Eventually Judaism is essentially completely cleansed of mythology, and develops a fully apophatic notion of the divine, to such an extent that this sacred cow can't even be uddered (i.e., G-d).
In turn, once the idea of God is completely demythologized -- or what we would call "unsaturated" -- the historical stage is set for God to appear as he is, as opposed to how we would like for him to be.
In other words, not only did God have to prepare a people for the divine descent, he had to create an "empty space," a literal void, a "higher nothingness" (which in a way parallels the original creatio ex nihilo). This is why Jesus' appearance was so unexpected (to say the least) and unprecedented (although in hindsight, we can see that there were hints and clues all along). Those who did nurture the idea of a specific messiah obviously didn't envision anything like Jesus. No one saw it coming in this particular form. Only after the fact did the apostles begin putting two and two together; or perhaps we should say three and one.
Also, as Magnus suggests, the divine descent is not the end, but only the beginning. And while in some sense the "victory" over matter is assured, this hardly means that it will be a smooth ride from here to the eshchaton.
Rather -- and I mentioned this in a comment yesterday -- it seems that the later Soloviev (1890-1900) was considerably more pessimystic than the early, more optimystic Soloviev (1873-1883), which is a good thing. While he never abandoned his Christocentric cosmic evolutionism, as he matured, he developed a much greater appreciation of the Hostile Forces that oppose the evolution, both individually and collectively. Balthasar feels this makes him a much deeper thinker than Teilhard, who had a fair amount of new-age fuzziness and happy talk about him. Teilhard definitely failed to appreciate the Dark Side.
This is also what elevates Soloviev above Hegel, as well as the upside-down Hegelians, i.e., the left. In the case of Hegel, his idea of the Absolute is far too abstract, and tends to blot out both the individual and the historical landscape, as if we are all just riding on the dialectic that inevitably returns us to Absolute Spirit.
And in the case of the left -- and we see this in an astonishingly immature form in the Obama cult -- people really believed that the election of this cunning and transparently mendacious politician would lead to some kind of "transformation of consciousness," or Deepak's "quantum leap in awareness." Please. Leftism can only create a heap of ants, not any true interior unity.
Here again, this emphasizes the importance of demythologizing the spiritual space, because if you don't, you will simply fill it with your own retrograde fantasies, as does the left. One would hope that no true conservative is foolish enough to believe that the evil in man can be transformed by electing this or that politician. If anything, a noble man such as Ronald Reagan only makes them hate that more fervently. The left despises nobility in all its forms, and nobility is one of the first fruits of Spirit. In reducing man to matter, they rob him of his nobility and try to make up for the loss with stolen goodies, thus plunging him further into the abyss.
The "principle of progress" can only be located in the individual, and only then because he is embedded in a deeper movement of "the evolution of nature towards man, of history towards Christ, and the Church toward the Kingdom of God in its completeness." Absent this movement, there is no progress, only agitation and change. Nor is there any true hope, only a counterfeit and reactionary hope that obscures their cosmic hopelessness.
Like me, it seems that Soloviev tried to playgiarize with everyone and everything in order to Bobtize the cosmos. Thus, "he fully appropriates" these sources for himself; "the muddy stream runs through him as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear, disinfected waters," so these sources might "live and breath... in an atmosphere of unqualified transparency and intelligibility."
Regarding mind parasites, Soloviev came to appreciate that "the forces of egotism are given to man not to be destroyed but to be transformed, just as God himself creates good out of evil. The dark 'ground' is constantly in need of being brought to illumination." Illuminate and eliminate, as Petey always says.
But the main point is that we do not escape from matter, but transform it: "Christianity sees material life as the necessary foundation for the realization of divine truth, the embodiment of divine spirit.... [I]t is only the acknowledgment of matter in its true significance that sets us free from actual slavish dependence upon it, from an involuntary materialism." Indeed, "so long as man does not feel material nature in himself and outside himself as something that is his own, something akin to him, he does not love it, and he is not yet free from it" (emphasis mine).
So real freedom is identified with love, but especially in the "sacred marriage of Heaven and earth," or the union "between the fully incarnate deity and divinized reality of the world." "Sophia is the eternal feminine in the world, the eternal object of God's love." In their eternal union, God and Sophia become "one flesh," or Theosophia (in its proper sense, not the brand name).
Again, this is why Christian wisdom is always embodied wisdom, not some abstract ideal that is imposed upon reality. No: "the understanding alone is in no way the organ by means of which we can know any actual reality. Such reality can be known only through genuine experience," i.e., O-->(n).
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Evolution and the Divinization of Man
Okay, so now I'm completely sidetracked. While I'm still blogging about volume one, I'm now up into volume three of The Glory of the Lord, which has a chapter on the 19th century Russian philosopher, theologian, prophet, mystic, and all-around holy man, Vladimir Soloviev.
I'd come across the name before, but never followed up. Now I'm so preoccupied, that it's difficult to pick up the thread from where we left off yesterday. Might as well get it out of my system. Or, as John Lee Hooker said, let that boy boogie woogie, 'cause it's in him and it got to come out!
This all happened at around bedtime last night, so I ended up staying up late on a wild nous chase. Here's what initially caught my attention:
"Soloviev's skill in the technique of integrating all partial truths in one vision makes him perhaps second only to Thomas Aquinas as the greatest artist of order and organization in the history of thought."
As the note to myself in margin puts it, (?!).
Balthasar goes on to say that "There is no system that fails to furnish him with substantial building material, once he has stripped and emptied it of the poison of its negative aspects" -- including Darwin and evolutionism. Which naturally made me think of Aurobindo, who was floating in just as Soloviev was floating out (Soloviev died in 1900; Aurobindo began his outpouring in about 1912 or so).
So then I'm thinking to mysoph, "maybe this guy already accomplished the Aurobindonization of Christianity (so to speak), so my work here is finished, except that no one knows about him." Hmm.
Balthasar goes on to claim that Soloviev's is "the most universal intellectual construction of modern times," and is "beyond question the most profound vindication and the most comprehensive philosophical statement of Christian totality in modern times." He brings the "whole ethical and theoretical scheme to perfection in a universal theological aesthetic."
Furthermore, "Soloviev's thinking has an urgency attained by no one since Hegel, and it operates on the same level as Hegel's," that is, in the highest reaches of Absolute Spirit. (Of course, many people have compared Hegel and Aurobindo in that regard, at least in broad outline.)
So, who wouldn't be curious? I read a little further, and discovered that Soloviev honed in on the ideas of process (anticipating Whitehead) and evolution (anticipating Teilhard), which provide a master key -- both macro- and microcosmically -- in the sense outlined in my book, i.e, Cosmotheosis:
"By this means, the total meaning of the world's evolution is clearly established for the future: the development of humanity and the totality of the world into the cosmic body of Christ, the realization of the eschatological relation of mutuality between the incarnate Word and Sophia" (Balthasar), in a profound marriage of cosmic coonvenience.
Or, put it this way (and this has an obvious Aurobindean flavor, in terms of the divine descent and the divinization of Man): "The theme and content of Soloviev's aesthetic is nothing less than this: the progressive eschatological embodiment of the Divine Idea in worldly reality."
On the one hand, "the Divine Spirit is indeed in and for itself the highest reality, while the material being of the world is in itself no more than indeterminacy, an eternal pressure toward and yearning after the form" (↑).
In turn, "the impress of the limitless fulness and determinacy of God [acts] upon the abyss of cosmic potentiality" (↓). The human state is the conscious meeting place of this metacosmic (↑) and (↓), but only because O took on human form and now dwells in human nature.
So we live in a kind of spiritual whirlpool or dynamic process-structure created by the vertical energies of (↑↓), which in turn have a "purifying" effect, somewhat like the rinse cycle in your washing machine, which baptizes the garments in clean water and spins out the entropic impurities.
Soloviev refers to the "conquest" of the nondivine, through which God can "manifest his plenitude and totality and cause it to prevail even in what is opposed to it -- in what is finite, separated, egotistically divided, evil." In other words, the (↑↓) process automatically lifts us out of the closed system of our finite state, while simultaneously "cleansing" us of various personal and cultural parasites.
On the other hand, materialism is like trying to wash clothes in the drier. In that case, the impurities are simply baked in.
Soloviev also makes room for the divinization (as opposed to obliteration) of the individual personality, which, of course, is of great interest to a Raccoon, especially me.
Specifically, Soloviev's thought integrates "all partial points of view and forms of actualization into an organic totality that annuls and uplifts all things in a manner that preserves that which is transcended," i.e., you. What is specifically preserved -- and this is a very Coonish sentiment -- is
"the eternal, ideal kernel of every person in so far as it has been integrated into the entirety of the cosmic body of God.... There is no ultimate absorption of all things into an absolute spiritual subject."
Again, evolution; it is not as if the Kingdom of God crashes down into history once and for all. Rather, the Kingdom "must necessarily grow into maturity just as much from within," like any other organismic entity.
True, Christ is dropped down into history at a certain point, but it is not as if the human soil didn't have to be prepared for thousands of years, nor does it mean that we don't have to nurture and gradually assimilate this divine explosion as it ramifies through history. Again, timelessness takes time.
As Soloviev explains, this ultimate divine descent becomes a kind of fixed foundation planted within the middle of change, as opposed to being the principle of change. What is therefore sought "is a humanity to answer to this Divinity," that is, "a humanity capable of uniting itself" with this object. Evolution no longer implies an absurd, open-ended nihilism with no ground or goal, but the very basis of hominization and its fulfillment in Homo noeticus.
This then becomes "the active principle of history, the principle of motion and progress," as man evolves toward what he already is in essence, thanks to the grand-me-down of the Son, or our adopted brother. "The outcome must be man divinized, that is, the humanity that has taken the Divine into itself." And vice versa, so that the world becomes "the vessel and the vehicle of absolute being."
What, you have something more important to do?
I'd come across the name before, but never followed up. Now I'm so preoccupied, that it's difficult to pick up the thread from where we left off yesterday. Might as well get it out of my system. Or, as John Lee Hooker said, let that boy boogie woogie, 'cause it's in him and it got to come out!
This all happened at around bedtime last night, so I ended up staying up late on a wild nous chase. Here's what initially caught my attention:
"Soloviev's skill in the technique of integrating all partial truths in one vision makes him perhaps second only to Thomas Aquinas as the greatest artist of order and organization in the history of thought."
As the note to myself in margin puts it, (?!).
Balthasar goes on to say that "There is no system that fails to furnish him with substantial building material, once he has stripped and emptied it of the poison of its negative aspects" -- including Darwin and evolutionism. Which naturally made me think of Aurobindo, who was floating in just as Soloviev was floating out (Soloviev died in 1900; Aurobindo began his outpouring in about 1912 or so).
So then I'm thinking to mysoph, "maybe this guy already accomplished the Aurobindonization of Christianity (so to speak), so my work here is finished, except that no one knows about him." Hmm.
Balthasar goes on to claim that Soloviev's is "the most universal intellectual construction of modern times," and is "beyond question the most profound vindication and the most comprehensive philosophical statement of Christian totality in modern times." He brings the "whole ethical and theoretical scheme to perfection in a universal theological aesthetic."
Furthermore, "Soloviev's thinking has an urgency attained by no one since Hegel, and it operates on the same level as Hegel's," that is, in the highest reaches of Absolute Spirit. (Of course, many people have compared Hegel and Aurobindo in that regard, at least in broad outline.)
So, who wouldn't be curious? I read a little further, and discovered that Soloviev honed in on the ideas of process (anticipating Whitehead) and evolution (anticipating Teilhard), which provide a master key -- both macro- and microcosmically -- in the sense outlined in my book, i.e, Cosmotheosis:
"By this means, the total meaning of the world's evolution is clearly established for the future: the development of humanity and the totality of the world into the cosmic body of Christ, the realization of the eschatological relation of mutuality between the incarnate Word and Sophia" (Balthasar), in a profound marriage of cosmic coonvenience.
Or, put it this way (and this has an obvious Aurobindean flavor, in terms of the divine descent and the divinization of Man): "The theme and content of Soloviev's aesthetic is nothing less than this: the progressive eschatological embodiment of the Divine Idea in worldly reality."
On the one hand, "the Divine Spirit is indeed in and for itself the highest reality, while the material being of the world is in itself no more than indeterminacy, an eternal pressure toward and yearning after the form" (↑).
In turn, "the impress of the limitless fulness and determinacy of God [acts] upon the abyss of cosmic potentiality" (↓). The human state is the conscious meeting place of this metacosmic (↑) and (↓), but only because O took on human form and now dwells in human nature.
So we live in a kind of spiritual whirlpool or dynamic process-structure created by the vertical energies of (↑↓), which in turn have a "purifying" effect, somewhat like the rinse cycle in your washing machine, which baptizes the garments in clean water and spins out the entropic impurities.
Soloviev refers to the "conquest" of the nondivine, through which God can "manifest his plenitude and totality and cause it to prevail even in what is opposed to it -- in what is finite, separated, egotistically divided, evil." In other words, the (↑↓) process automatically lifts us out of the closed system of our finite state, while simultaneously "cleansing" us of various personal and cultural parasites.
On the other hand, materialism is like trying to wash clothes in the drier. In that case, the impurities are simply baked in.
Soloviev also makes room for the divinization (as opposed to obliteration) of the individual personality, which, of course, is of great interest to a Raccoon, especially me.
Specifically, Soloviev's thought integrates "all partial points of view and forms of actualization into an organic totality that annuls and uplifts all things in a manner that preserves that which is transcended," i.e., you. What is specifically preserved -- and this is a very Coonish sentiment -- is
"the eternal, ideal kernel of every person in so far as it has been integrated into the entirety of the cosmic body of God.... There is no ultimate absorption of all things into an absolute spiritual subject."
Again, evolution; it is not as if the Kingdom of God crashes down into history once and for all. Rather, the Kingdom "must necessarily grow into maturity just as much from within," like any other organismic entity.
True, Christ is dropped down into history at a certain point, but it is not as if the human soil didn't have to be prepared for thousands of years, nor does it mean that we don't have to nurture and gradually assimilate this divine explosion as it ramifies through history. Again, timelessness takes time.
As Soloviev explains, this ultimate divine descent becomes a kind of fixed foundation planted within the middle of change, as opposed to being the principle of change. What is therefore sought "is a humanity to answer to this Divinity," that is, "a humanity capable of uniting itself" with this object. Evolution no longer implies an absurd, open-ended nihilism with no ground or goal, but the very basis of hominization and its fulfillment in Homo noeticus.
This then becomes "the active principle of history, the principle of motion and progress," as man evolves toward what he already is in essence, thanks to the grand-me-down of the Son, or our adopted brother. "The outcome must be man divinized, that is, the humanity that has taken the Divine into itself." And vice versa, so that the world becomes "the vessel and the vehicle of absolute being."
What, you have something more important to do?
Monday, February 02, 2009
The Moon Shining at Midday
For anyone who sees -- or who believes they can see -- real beauty in the world, Christianity offers the ultimate vindication, since it permits us "to possess the infinite within the finitude of form" (Balthasar). Again, for the irreligious anthropocentrist, beauty necessarily withers and disintegrates under the crushing weight of a barbarous materialism, or, at the other end, an effete idealism that swallows up the finite within the infinite, denying the dignity and nobility of the former.
You could say that with Christianity, male and female (i.e., Absolute and Infinite) are harmonized and love hopefully ever after. We needn't divorce the primordial couple and grant custody of our lives to One or the (M)other. But the materialist gives custody of his soul to mamamaya, while the idealist gives it to papurusha (in Vedanta, purusha is the masculine principle which "witnesses" the play of maya, the eternal feminine).
Since God manifests as the wholeness of beauty, we must enter a mode that is adequate to this beauty, since beauty always transcends the components through which it expresses itself. According to Balthasar, faith is the theological act of perception. And naturally, this faith must be with the whole being -- heart, mind, and soul -- in order to be adequate to the wholeness we seek. This would be one of the meanings of "no one comes to the father but through me," because faith in the Son objectively reveals the beauty of the Father (i.e., he is the Form of the Formless, not in some secondary manner, but intrinsically so).
Or am I off base? I'm not a theologian, but I play one in cyberspace. Let's just say it makes sense to me so far.
Speaking of which, one of the reasons I still hesitate to join a formal organization (aside from the Raccoons) is that I would have a hard time with someone saying to me, "nope. Can't think that. This is the proper way." That may well be the case, but I still need to discover these truths independently, or they might never be realized in me. Or, put it this way: I find it very.... bracing to independently discover and realize this or that transcendent truth, even (or especially!) when it's been discovered millions of times before by earlier pneumanauts. On the other hand, I find it tedious to merely learn it. It's like the difference between reading about love vs. falling in love, or studying child development vs. having a child.
Obviously, I give great weight to precedent and tradition. But say, in the case of Balthasar, I'm not merely trying to "learn" from him, much less memorize his ideas. Rather, I am attempting to enter his world, so that I might begin to see what he sees. And I am doing so in faith, because I am quite sure that he is someone worthy of my entrusting it to him. How do I know this? Well, first of all, judge the tree according to its fruits, and I'm feeling pretty fruity lately, even if I only understand about half of what he's talking about and just bobtize the rest.
Here, this is good: elsewhere, Balthasar says that "Faith is the light of God becoming luminous in man," for in the end, "God is known only by God." So faith is the dark light with which God sees himself through us.
Which reminds me of a vivid dream I had the other night. The idea of the "sun shining at midnight" is a common metaphor for the mystical experience, in which plunging ourselves into the deepest darkness reveals the brightest light. But in this dream, the moon was shining at midday. It was a moon as bright as the sun, setting out over the ocean.
I meditated on this image, and it made me think of gnosis (the good kind), through which we are able to apprehend the subtle light of God even amidst the overpowering brightness of the material world. I would even go so far as to say that cOOnvision is nothing less than "the mOOn shining at midday," through which our night vision is preserved even within the blinding brightness of the day. A materialist knows only the midday sun, as his faculties are too dense to apprehend anything more subtle than that.
So the first thing we must cultivate is this subtle "light of faith," which can more or less become extinguished if not tended to and nurtured. Here again, this is quite different from the manner in which religion was presented to me as a young kit, and which made it so easy to reject and even ridicule. For it is not simply a matter of transferring "the psychology of the purely human belief in testimony onto the Christian faith," as if we are studying something as concrete as matter.
I am reminded of something James mentioned in a comment about the intelligent design/evolution debate:
"Both sides of the ID/Ev debate want to be seen as doing 'science' as the term is presently accepted, which (in their context) means they want to be seen as doing biology. This is why I see the whole debate as an inner-biological turf war. So long as all sides are insisting 'I am doing biology' I don’t see how my opinion is of any ultimate importance."
As you no doubt recall, I mentioned this point on page 38 of the Coonifesto: "And yet, our wonderment at the mere order of the universe -- marvelous though it may be -- is misplaced. Both the scientific priesthood and the creationist countermovement make much of this order, but to opposite ends (one to prove the necessity of a creator, the other to prove a creator unnecessary). Either way, a metaphysics of order is a metaphysics of the dead-on-arrival past, an eternally frozen or repetitive universe seen through the rearview mirror of mathematical invariance."
James points out that "the upshot of no one respecting the rigor of theology, and everyone respecting the rigor of science, is that when people want rigorous arguments for God’s existence they turn to physics or biology or thermodynamics, etc. Let ‘em go if they want to. They can see what the modern sciences will give them. In the meantime, theology still remains with all of its rigor, all of its certainty, all of its non-hypothetical knowledge, and a whole cache of proofs that work regardless of how the ID/Ev debate falls out.
"And yes, some of the arguments that theology has are design arguments. The design arguments (as St. Thomas articulates them) work just fine regardless of whether living species came to exist by chance. St. Thomas, following Aristotle, never denied that many things arise by chance."
The point is, the ID proponents are in a way as metaphysically hamhanded as those they would presume to defeat, because they are still conceding true theology to science, instead of developing a mode of perception adequate to the theological object. Once you accomplish the latter, then you realize that of course the cosmos manifests a deep intelligence and beautiful order on every level. How could it not? If intelligent people want to spend their lives proving that intelligence doesn't exist, let 'em go nuts, since they already are anyway.
For as Balthasar writes, "When the spirit attains to real Being it necessarily touches God, the source and ground of all Being. The spirit's horizon is not confined to worldly being, but extends to absolute Being, and only in this light can it think, will, and love; only in this light of Being does it possess language as the power to know and to name existents. Otherwise, no proof of God could ever be formulated, or be in any way conclusive." For it is "only here in the innermost sanctum of the spirit that the deeper and higher light of the self-disclosing God can shine out of the light of Being."
By first becoming adequate to this Being through the grace of faith, grace then assimilates us into its endless depths. The moon shines at midday. Congratulations. You are a loony Coon.
You could say that with Christianity, male and female (i.e., Absolute and Infinite) are harmonized and love hopefully ever after. We needn't divorce the primordial couple and grant custody of our lives to One or the (M)other. But the materialist gives custody of his soul to mamamaya, while the idealist gives it to papurusha (in Vedanta, purusha is the masculine principle which "witnesses" the play of maya, the eternal feminine).
Since God manifests as the wholeness of beauty, we must enter a mode that is adequate to this beauty, since beauty always transcends the components through which it expresses itself. According to Balthasar, faith is the theological act of perception. And naturally, this faith must be with the whole being -- heart, mind, and soul -- in order to be adequate to the wholeness we seek. This would be one of the meanings of "no one comes to the father but through me," because faith in the Son objectively reveals the beauty of the Father (i.e., he is the Form of the Formless, not in some secondary manner, but intrinsically so).
Or am I off base? I'm not a theologian, but I play one in cyberspace. Let's just say it makes sense to me so far.
Speaking of which, one of the reasons I still hesitate to join a formal organization (aside from the Raccoons) is that I would have a hard time with someone saying to me, "nope. Can't think that. This is the proper way." That may well be the case, but I still need to discover these truths independently, or they might never be realized in me. Or, put it this way: I find it very.... bracing to independently discover and realize this or that transcendent truth, even (or especially!) when it's been discovered millions of times before by earlier pneumanauts. On the other hand, I find it tedious to merely learn it. It's like the difference between reading about love vs. falling in love, or studying child development vs. having a child.
Obviously, I give great weight to precedent and tradition. But say, in the case of Balthasar, I'm not merely trying to "learn" from him, much less memorize his ideas. Rather, I am attempting to enter his world, so that I might begin to see what he sees. And I am doing so in faith, because I am quite sure that he is someone worthy of my entrusting it to him. How do I know this? Well, first of all, judge the tree according to its fruits, and I'm feeling pretty fruity lately, even if I only understand about half of what he's talking about and just bobtize the rest.
Here, this is good: elsewhere, Balthasar says that "Faith is the light of God becoming luminous in man," for in the end, "God is known only by God." So faith is the dark light with which God sees himself through us.
Which reminds me of a vivid dream I had the other night. The idea of the "sun shining at midnight" is a common metaphor for the mystical experience, in which plunging ourselves into the deepest darkness reveals the brightest light. But in this dream, the moon was shining at midday. It was a moon as bright as the sun, setting out over the ocean.
I meditated on this image, and it made me think of gnosis (the good kind), through which we are able to apprehend the subtle light of God even amidst the overpowering brightness of the material world. I would even go so far as to say that cOOnvision is nothing less than "the mOOn shining at midday," through which our night vision is preserved even within the blinding brightness of the day. A materialist knows only the midday sun, as his faculties are too dense to apprehend anything more subtle than that.
So the first thing we must cultivate is this subtle "light of faith," which can more or less become extinguished if not tended to and nurtured. Here again, this is quite different from the manner in which religion was presented to me as a young kit, and which made it so easy to reject and even ridicule. For it is not simply a matter of transferring "the psychology of the purely human belief in testimony onto the Christian faith," as if we are studying something as concrete as matter.
I am reminded of something James mentioned in a comment about the intelligent design/evolution debate:
"Both sides of the ID/Ev debate want to be seen as doing 'science' as the term is presently accepted, which (in their context) means they want to be seen as doing biology. This is why I see the whole debate as an inner-biological turf war. So long as all sides are insisting 'I am doing biology' I don’t see how my opinion is of any ultimate importance."
As you no doubt recall, I mentioned this point on page 38 of the Coonifesto: "And yet, our wonderment at the mere order of the universe -- marvelous though it may be -- is misplaced. Both the scientific priesthood and the creationist countermovement make much of this order, but to opposite ends (one to prove the necessity of a creator, the other to prove a creator unnecessary). Either way, a metaphysics of order is a metaphysics of the dead-on-arrival past, an eternally frozen or repetitive universe seen through the rearview mirror of mathematical invariance."
James points out that "the upshot of no one respecting the rigor of theology, and everyone respecting the rigor of science, is that when people want rigorous arguments for God’s existence they turn to physics or biology or thermodynamics, etc. Let ‘em go if they want to. They can see what the modern sciences will give them. In the meantime, theology still remains with all of its rigor, all of its certainty, all of its non-hypothetical knowledge, and a whole cache of proofs that work regardless of how the ID/Ev debate falls out.
"And yes, some of the arguments that theology has are design arguments. The design arguments (as St. Thomas articulates them) work just fine regardless of whether living species came to exist by chance. St. Thomas, following Aristotle, never denied that many things arise by chance."
The point is, the ID proponents are in a way as metaphysically hamhanded as those they would presume to defeat, because they are still conceding true theology to science, instead of developing a mode of perception adequate to the theological object. Once you accomplish the latter, then you realize that of course the cosmos manifests a deep intelligence and beautiful order on every level. How could it not? If intelligent people want to spend their lives proving that intelligence doesn't exist, let 'em go nuts, since they already are anyway.
For as Balthasar writes, "When the spirit attains to real Being it necessarily touches God, the source and ground of all Being. The spirit's horizon is not confined to worldly being, but extends to absolute Being, and only in this light can it think, will, and love; only in this light of Being does it possess language as the power to know and to name existents. Otherwise, no proof of God could ever be formulated, or be in any way conclusive." For it is "only here in the innermost sanctum of the spirit that the deeper and higher light of the self-disclosing God can shine out of the light of Being."
By first becoming adequate to this Being through the grace of faith, grace then assimilates us into its endless depths. The moon shines at midday. Congratulations. You are a loony Coon.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Voidgin Births, Immaculate Coonceptions, and Speaking Obonics
Originally posted exactly two years ago today, and I wouldn't change a single word of it. Therefore, I changed quite a few.
******
In order to novelgaze at a fresh world each day, one must train oneself -- wait, that's too general. I will speak only of myself.
In order for me to blog something different about the good nous every day, I have had to train mysoph to listen more carefreely to the smallstool voice of Petey, who is actually dropping little fragrant pellets of wisdom all the time. In fact, one of the helpful tidbits he shared with me is that he has always been sharing these helpful tidbits with me, but that I was so "dense" that I treated them like turdbits.
And when I say "dense" I mean dense, as in "dense." One must learn to "tune into" the remarkable subtlety of one's own mind, which truly has a mind of its own, just like the Dreamer who dreams your dreams. The difference, say, between a common materialist and a man of genuine spiritual achievement is merely a few immeasurable microns of psychic subtlety.
I can say this because my mind is -- pretty much by definition -- no more intelligent than it has ever been, and yet, much more subtle than it has ever been, in the sense of being able to see and understand spiritual realities. As a result, I "know" things today that I couldn't possibly have known 10 or 15 years ago. But at the same time -- at risk of smelling blasfumy -- Christ himself couldn't have taught me these things back then. They could have been handed to me on a silver platter, but I would have rejected them with a silvery platitude. The yolk would have wasted on my infertile egghead.
[Most of you may not relate to this, but I experienced an auditory analogue of this subtlety last week when visiting the in-laws. My F in L has a pair of Martin Logan speakers, which operate along completely different principles -- and a very different price range -- than standard speakers. I have no idea how the the technology works, but it's called "electrostatic"; notice how you can see through them.
[Anyway, the bottom line is a very different aural experience. Obviously hard to write about sound, any more than you can dance about architecture, but the music had a distinctly "airy," "transparent" and "shimmery" quality. Also, the sound image definitely couldn't be located as emanating from any source, but was suspended there holographically before me. Instead of the sound coming "at" me, it was as if I were "within" it. The point is, the speakers weren't just quantitatively better, but qualitatively better. Same "information," new experience. The bad news is that now my fairly expensive speakers sound to me like an AM radio. The sound is very "hard" and "dense" compared to the Martin Logans.]
When most spiritual types talk about eliminating the "ego," it always strikes me as just so much new age pneumababble. They don't know what they're talking about, because you can no more live without an ego than you can live without a brain. What we call the ego is simply your psychic "center of gravity" at any given moment, and it is actually a good thing to be aware of this center (more often than not, a person is mentally ill precisely because they lack such a center, for mind parasites are "attractors" with their own chaotically shifting centers in the fabric of consciousness; furthermore, these individuals often confuse having no homogeneous center with having transcended the ego. For such immature individuals, "spirituality" is an invitation to act out their parasites).
Having said that, our center can be wide or narrow, shallow or deep, dense or subtle, and those are the real issues. In my opinion, all this new age talk of "ego" must result from some kind of misunderstanding or mistranslation of the original Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist texts.
For me, it is much more meaningful to discuss it in terms of the shift in perspective that takes place when our psychic center transitions from the exterior/horizontal to the interior/vertical (for which I used the symbols (•) and (¶) in my book). This is, broadly speaking, what we would call being "born again from above." Thus, we don't so much eliminate the ego as give it a new life and a new orientation. You can give it a new name if you like, but obviously there is some continuity with the old you. In a certain sense, it is merely the "real you," minus all the cultural, familial, and other accretions. Perhaps the best way to think of it is to say that (¶) transcends but includes (•), in the same way that algebra transcends but includes arithmetic.
Another thing I've noticed is that as my "thinking" has become more subtle, I myself have grown increasingly "simple." The always excellent Lee Harris has spoken of how it took him some 30 years to unlearn the nonsense he learned in the course of his higher education, in order to once again be able to think clearly. I understand exactly what he means.
In a brief article entitled Good is Bad, Stanley Kurtz "reviews" a book review of an anthology called Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys. The original book review, written by a typically confused leftist, criticizes the book on the grounds that it is clear and well-written:
“'Almost without exception,' Jacoby begins, 'each essay is lucid and articulate.... Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid?' 'Unlikely,' Jacoby answers. The leftist professorate, he admits, 'distrusts clear prose as superficial.... On the basis of this volume, conservatives are excellent writers -- and facile thinkers. Perhaps the two go together.'”
There are huge differences between being clear about complex ideas (the right), being obscure, confused, or disingenuous about simplistic or kooky ones (the left), attacking cognitive links in order to dismantle meaning (the angry/psychotic left), superimposing fantasized meaning onto the world (the frightened/paranoid left), and using unsaturated language in such a way that you attempt to "reproduce" a spiritual experience in another ("Coonspeak," or "Obonics"). In fact, the reader who alerted me to this article actually accused Dear Leader, of all people, of falling into the category of the academonic leftist who writes in a needlessly convoluted manner about a subject -- presumably spirituality -- that is inherently simple. If so, one can only wonder why he would waste his time trying to unravel my mystagogic Bobscurities?
No. My writing is not the least bit complex. Rather, it is very precise, and makes perfect nonsense so long as you understand Obonics. However, as touched on above, there is a real challange involved in trying to utilize language in such a manner that you "reproduce" not just empirical facts -- which is easy -- but a spiritual experience in another, like those holographically shimmery Martin Logans. How do you do that with language? I'm not saying that I always succeed; however, I know for a fact that I sometimes do, for many readers have told me so.
Back when I was more of a garden-variety intellectual, I was full of all kinds of academically correct "ruling ideas" and dogmas -- all of the things people think are true because other important people think they're true, so you end up thinking thoughts that were actually manufactured elsewhere, in someone else's mind. But as Satprem, a sadhak of Sri Aurobindo's yoga, wrote, "Clearly, if we want to discover a new country within us, we must first leave the old one behind -- everything depends on our determination in taking this first step."
This first step is also the last step -- and every step in between -- for, in the words of Aurobindo, "fitness and unfitness are only a way of speaking; man is unfit and a misfit (so far as spiritual things are concerned) -- in his outward nature. But within there is a soul and above there is a Grace. This is all you know or need to know. "
A soul behind (¶) and a grace above (↓). What could be more simple? But simple hardly means simplistic, much less easy, for recognizing and living within this simple truth is the ongoing task of the spiritual life, i.e., O-->(n). To "transcend" or "eliminate" the ego really comes down to identifying with the wider reality to which the exteriorizing ego attaches itself.
As I mentioned, I have seen this occur in my own being, as I have gradually given up "thinking" for something that feels quite different. Perhaps Will touched on it yesterday, in his most excellent and luminous comment about the two types of creativity and their analogy to the Divine creativity. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to focus on the second type of creativity, which
"does not involve the sense of 'creative build-up and release'. In fact, it's almost a 'give it or take it' creativity -- it's the kind of creativity characterized by the term 'not-doing'. The effortless effort, not there one second, there the next second, no explosion. Henry Miller's early 'Tropic' works, I think, are a good example of the compulsive, build-up and explode type of creativity. His later writings, such as Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch -- in which Miller turned to attention fully to spiritual matters -- are a good example of the quiet, serene, effortless effort type of creativity...
"Early Beethoven -- compulsive build-up/explosion creativity. Beethoven's late string quartets -- definitely effortless effort, very Zen. One thing that makes them so beautiful is the feeling that Beethoven could just as easily *not* have composed them. Shakespeare, too -- though the plays are replete with fury and emotion, there is something eerily detached about them that suggests that they were 'breathed into existence', not exploded into being.
"Eckhart once said in a sermon... something to the effect that when God created the cosmos, He actually didn't *do* anything. Enigmatic, yes, but I think it suggests that the Godhead's creativity was and is, at root, the 'effortless effort'. On the plane of being, this creativity is the most transcendent.
"There are those who will tell you that 'not-being' informs 'being' at every moment, which is what makes existence so beautiful.
"Anyway, I think the transcendent, less ego-individualistic, 'effortless effort' artist will eventually become the ideal. That, in turn, will reflect on our perspective of the Creator's divine nature."
Yes, yes, and yes. In short, "ys." I believe this second type of creativity is analogous to the "virgin birth," that is, the immaculate conception that occurs as a result of our soul's feminine receptivity to vertical influences, as the "Son" is eternally (re)born in the ground of our being: A soul behind and a grace above, is all you know or need to know.
As Molly Bloom -- the archetypal feminine -- says in her interior dialogue at the conclusion of Ulysses, as she relinquishes the ego and falls into sleep -- the brother of death: and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Now now, keep it clean. Seed, soil, conception, birth. As above, so below. It might as well be Saint Teresa. Same story in a different context. In any event, if you wish to give your consciousness a wider berth, you must learn to say yes to the Divine Influx.
******
In order to novelgaze at a fresh world each day, one must train oneself -- wait, that's too general. I will speak only of myself.
In order for me to blog something different about the good nous every day, I have had to train mysoph to listen more carefreely to the smallstool voice of Petey, who is actually dropping little fragrant pellets of wisdom all the time. In fact, one of the helpful tidbits he shared with me is that he has always been sharing these helpful tidbits with me, but that I was so "dense" that I treated them like turdbits.
And when I say "dense" I mean dense, as in "dense." One must learn to "tune into" the remarkable subtlety of one's own mind, which truly has a mind of its own, just like the Dreamer who dreams your dreams. The difference, say, between a common materialist and a man of genuine spiritual achievement is merely a few immeasurable microns of psychic subtlety.
I can say this because my mind is -- pretty much by definition -- no more intelligent than it has ever been, and yet, much more subtle than it has ever been, in the sense of being able to see and understand spiritual realities. As a result, I "know" things today that I couldn't possibly have known 10 or 15 years ago. But at the same time -- at risk of smelling blasfumy -- Christ himself couldn't have taught me these things back then. They could have been handed to me on a silver platter, but I would have rejected them with a silvery platitude. The yolk would have wasted on my infertile egghead.
[Most of you may not relate to this, but I experienced an auditory analogue of this subtlety last week when visiting the in-laws. My F in L has a pair of Martin Logan speakers, which operate along completely different principles -- and a very different price range -- than standard speakers. I have no idea how the the technology works, but it's called "electrostatic"; notice how you can see through them.
[Anyway, the bottom line is a very different aural experience. Obviously hard to write about sound, any more than you can dance about architecture, but the music had a distinctly "airy," "transparent" and "shimmery" quality. Also, the sound image definitely couldn't be located as emanating from any source, but was suspended there holographically before me. Instead of the sound coming "at" me, it was as if I were "within" it. The point is, the speakers weren't just quantitatively better, but qualitatively better. Same "information," new experience. The bad news is that now my fairly expensive speakers sound to me like an AM radio. The sound is very "hard" and "dense" compared to the Martin Logans.] When most spiritual types talk about eliminating the "ego," it always strikes me as just so much new age pneumababble. They don't know what they're talking about, because you can no more live without an ego than you can live without a brain. What we call the ego is simply your psychic "center of gravity" at any given moment, and it is actually a good thing to be aware of this center (more often than not, a person is mentally ill precisely because they lack such a center, for mind parasites are "attractors" with their own chaotically shifting centers in the fabric of consciousness; furthermore, these individuals often confuse having no homogeneous center with having transcended the ego. For such immature individuals, "spirituality" is an invitation to act out their parasites).
Having said that, our center can be wide or narrow, shallow or deep, dense or subtle, and those are the real issues. In my opinion, all this new age talk of "ego" must result from some kind of misunderstanding or mistranslation of the original Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist texts.
For me, it is much more meaningful to discuss it in terms of the shift in perspective that takes place when our psychic center transitions from the exterior/horizontal to the interior/vertical (for which I used the symbols (•) and (¶) in my book). This is, broadly speaking, what we would call being "born again from above." Thus, we don't so much eliminate the ego as give it a new life and a new orientation. You can give it a new name if you like, but obviously there is some continuity with the old you. In a certain sense, it is merely the "real you," minus all the cultural, familial, and other accretions. Perhaps the best way to think of it is to say that (¶) transcends but includes (•), in the same way that algebra transcends but includes arithmetic.
Another thing I've noticed is that as my "thinking" has become more subtle, I myself have grown increasingly "simple." The always excellent Lee Harris has spoken of how it took him some 30 years to unlearn the nonsense he learned in the course of his higher education, in order to once again be able to think clearly. I understand exactly what he means.
In a brief article entitled Good is Bad, Stanley Kurtz "reviews" a book review of an anthology called Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys. The original book review, written by a typically confused leftist, criticizes the book on the grounds that it is clear and well-written:
“'Almost without exception,' Jacoby begins, 'each essay is lucid and articulate.... Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid?' 'Unlikely,' Jacoby answers. The leftist professorate, he admits, 'distrusts clear prose as superficial.... On the basis of this volume, conservatives are excellent writers -- and facile thinkers. Perhaps the two go together.'”
There are huge differences between being clear about complex ideas (the right), being obscure, confused, or disingenuous about simplistic or kooky ones (the left), attacking cognitive links in order to dismantle meaning (the angry/psychotic left), superimposing fantasized meaning onto the world (the frightened/paranoid left), and using unsaturated language in such a way that you attempt to "reproduce" a spiritual experience in another ("Coonspeak," or "Obonics"). In fact, the reader who alerted me to this article actually accused Dear Leader, of all people, of falling into the category of the academonic leftist who writes in a needlessly convoluted manner about a subject -- presumably spirituality -- that is inherently simple. If so, one can only wonder why he would waste his time trying to unravel my mystagogic Bobscurities?
No. My writing is not the least bit complex. Rather, it is very precise, and makes perfect nonsense so long as you understand Obonics. However, as touched on above, there is a real challange involved in trying to utilize language in such a manner that you "reproduce" not just empirical facts -- which is easy -- but a spiritual experience in another, like those holographically shimmery Martin Logans. How do you do that with language? I'm not saying that I always succeed; however, I know for a fact that I sometimes do, for many readers have told me so.
Back when I was more of a garden-variety intellectual, I was full of all kinds of academically correct "ruling ideas" and dogmas -- all of the things people think are true because other important people think they're true, so you end up thinking thoughts that were actually manufactured elsewhere, in someone else's mind. But as Satprem, a sadhak of Sri Aurobindo's yoga, wrote, "Clearly, if we want to discover a new country within us, we must first leave the old one behind -- everything depends on our determination in taking this first step."
This first step is also the last step -- and every step in between -- for, in the words of Aurobindo, "fitness and unfitness are only a way of speaking; man is unfit and a misfit (so far as spiritual things are concerned) -- in his outward nature. But within there is a soul and above there is a Grace. This is all you know or need to know. "
A soul behind (¶) and a grace above (↓). What could be more simple? But simple hardly means simplistic, much less easy, for recognizing and living within this simple truth is the ongoing task of the spiritual life, i.e., O-->(n). To "transcend" or "eliminate" the ego really comes down to identifying with the wider reality to which the exteriorizing ego attaches itself.
As I mentioned, I have seen this occur in my own being, as I have gradually given up "thinking" for something that feels quite different. Perhaps Will touched on it yesterday, in his most excellent and luminous comment about the two types of creativity and their analogy to the Divine creativity. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to focus on the second type of creativity, which
"does not involve the sense of 'creative build-up and release'. In fact, it's almost a 'give it or take it' creativity -- it's the kind of creativity characterized by the term 'not-doing'. The effortless effort, not there one second, there the next second, no explosion. Henry Miller's early 'Tropic' works, I think, are a good example of the compulsive, build-up and explode type of creativity. His later writings, such as Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch -- in which Miller turned to attention fully to spiritual matters -- are a good example of the quiet, serene, effortless effort type of creativity...
"Early Beethoven -- compulsive build-up/explosion creativity. Beethoven's late string quartets -- definitely effortless effort, very Zen. One thing that makes them so beautiful is the feeling that Beethoven could just as easily *not* have composed them. Shakespeare, too -- though the plays are replete with fury and emotion, there is something eerily detached about them that suggests that they were 'breathed into existence', not exploded into being.
"Eckhart once said in a sermon... something to the effect that when God created the cosmos, He actually didn't *do* anything. Enigmatic, yes, but I think it suggests that the Godhead's creativity was and is, at root, the 'effortless effort'. On the plane of being, this creativity is the most transcendent.
"There are those who will tell you that 'not-being' informs 'being' at every moment, which is what makes existence so beautiful.
"Anyway, I think the transcendent, less ego-individualistic, 'effortless effort' artist will eventually become the ideal. That, in turn, will reflect on our perspective of the Creator's divine nature."
Yes, yes, and yes. In short, "ys." I believe this second type of creativity is analogous to the "virgin birth," that is, the immaculate conception that occurs as a result of our soul's feminine receptivity to vertical influences, as the "Son" is eternally (re)born in the ground of our being: A soul behind and a grace above, is all you know or need to know.
As Molly Bloom -- the archetypal feminine -- says in her interior dialogue at the conclusion of Ulysses, as she relinquishes the ego and falls into sleep -- the brother of death: and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Now now, keep it clean. Seed, soil, conception, birth. As above, so below. It might as well be Saint Teresa. Same story in a different context. In any event, if you wish to give your consciousness a wider berth, you must learn to say yes to the Divine Influx.
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