The Laws of Cosmic Attraction and Nausea

For this repost, I've reached waaaay down into the arkive, four years back. It's pretty basic, but perhaps it will be of assistance to newer readers who have a mysterious attraction (or repulsion) to the blog but don't know why.

A few readers have asked me to expand upon my description of the "friendly nonlocal operators who always standing by, ready to assist you."

Contrary to popular belief, the divine does not govern by authority or force, but by attraction. If people would just realize this point, it would clear up a lot of misunderstandings.

For example, yesterday I heard a comment from one of the family members whose spouse died on 9-11. She said something to the effect that "my God died that day," because He didn't intervene to stop the planes from hitting the buildings.

But looked at from the Christian point of view, this is not surprising. After all, a central feature of Christianity -- indeed, it's a little hard to miss -- is that God himself is reduced to a state of powerlessness and is crucified within history. In other words, even God submits to the rules of the universe he made. However, in so doing, he becomes the very strange attractor who draws men toward him.

In fact, in the Christian view, this ultimate case of submitting to history is the very gravitational "center" of history -- it is what history was leading up to, and the luminous point from which all subsequent history flows. It is the mysterious axis around which the very cosmos revolves.

This is in complete contrast to, say, the Muslim god, which is in fact a god of power and force, if not in principle, then certainly in fact. No offense, but it is what it is. Everywhere it has appeared, Islam has been forced upon people through violence and coercion. In the case of Christianity, it spread like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire, because when people heard the story, they were mysteriously attracted to it. In the case of Islam, it spread because people were attracted to the idea of keeping their head attached to their body.

(Note also that the wrong type of attraction causes Allah to unleash earthquakes.)

According to our Unknown Friend, the worship of power is the source of all idolatry. Thus, let us not pretend that there haven't been Christian idolaters. It's just that the worship of power is a human flaw, not something intrinsic to Christianity. Jesus emphasized this point time and again: "the meek shall inherit the earth," "blessed are the poor in spirit," "turn the other cheek," "blessed are you when they revile and persecute you," etc.

Even Genesis emphasizes this point. At first, Adam lives in spontaneous obedience to the God-attractor. The fall represents an act of willful disobedience -- of turning to another center of attraction represented by the serpent, quintessential ssssymbol of the horizontal.

The difference between "dark magic" and "sacred magic" is that, in the case of the former, the individual attempts to arrogate spiritual powers to himself, whereas in the latter, the individual submits to powers that exceed himself. One is achieved through force of will, the other through purity of will.

Truth, Love, and Beauty cannot be obtained through force. You cannot force someone to love you. Nor, for that matter, can God force you to love him. Why would anyone want to be loved through force, anyway?

In the realm of the vertical, attraction plays the same role as gravity in the horizontal. According to our anonymous friend, "the domain of our freedom itself, our spiritual life, shows the real and active presence of gravitation of a spiritual order. For what is the phenomenon of religion if not the manifestation of spiritual gravitation towards God -- i.e., towards the center of spiritual gravitation of the world?"

He goes on: "Now, the domain of freedom -- the spiritual life -- is found placed between two gravitational fields with two different centers. The Gospel designates them as 'heaven' and 'this world,' or as the 'kingdom of God' and the 'kingdom of the prince of this world.' And it designates those whose will follows or is submitted to the gravitation of 'this world' as 'children of this world,' and those whose will follows the gravitation of 'heaven' as 'children of light.'"

Now, one of the gifts you must cultivate in your spiritual practice is the ability to sense this "spiritual gravity." Just as your body has proprioceptors that help to orient you in physical space, we also possess spiritual receptors that help to orient us in vertical space.

If you develop an inner ear problem, you will become dizzy and disoriented in space, and probably get sick to your stomach as well. Likewise, if you have an inner eye problem, you won't be able to sense the spiritual attractors that allow you to make your way about the vertical, nor will exposure to toxic people such as Obama or Bill Clinton make you vomit (proof once again that some men are unfit to be ex-president). And please recall the importance of knowing when to vomit; it is one of our primary means of eliminating toxins from our body.

Imagine, for a moment, what the world would be like if we lacked such organs of spiritual reception. There would literally be no figurative up and down, no high and low, no good and evil, no truth or falsehood. Think: the entire world would be like academia.

One hardly has to imagine this spiritually weightless, topsy-turvy condition. The world is full of horizontal barbarians -- sons of the earth -- who are not oriented around any attractor above their own passions. But they love making destructive and envious raids on the vertical, the only way they know of its existence (just as a barbarian has no idea what is "inside" a book, only that it is a good thing for burning).

An extreme case would be the Nazis, who worshipped a god of pure will, of force, similar to the religious fascists with whom we are presently dealing. In the case of the Islamists, just consider the god to whom they are attracted: it is a purely terrestrial god who promises 72 virgins and other valuable prizes to genocidal mass murders.

Consider their misuse of the word "martyr" as someone who, through the force of his perverse will, murders as many innocent human beings as possible. The Christian -- or Jewish -- martyr (which means "witness," not "suicide bomber") is instead an I-witness of verticality to whom we are drawn by their living testimony -- say, dancing and singing on the way to the lions. Such a person is halfway back to paradise, in that he is fully committed to the vertical reality that is our origin and destiny.