The Builders Rejected by the Stoner in Chief

I didn't intend to spark a controversy with yesterday's post, not even a trivial one. The main point is that, say, communion (or any other group service) takes only a few minutes. What about the rest of the week? What shall be the focus of your spiritual life and activity, since you only have one soul and one life?

As for the extreme ascetical and penitential practices of Pope John Paul II, any pope is in a unique position, representing a billion souls in particular, and mankind in general, before God, and conversely, God before man. Who knows what kind of insopherable energy flows in both directions through that focal point of cosmosis?

Whatever it is, it is intense. But if no one but the president can really know what it's like to be president, this is even more true of the papacy. Part of being Pope involves no longer being the man, but the office, and all it implies.

It is, of course, analogous to Jesus, in which both the divine and human natures are copresent. But I'm guessing that the Pope has a much different (and unsettling) appreciation of the general human nature, similar to how the guru takes on the karma of the disciple.

Just a guess. But as a psychologist, I can tell you that it can be an overwhelming burden to have a single patient with primitive, borderline issues. It is impossible to imagine having millions upon millions of them. Or, imagine having a dozen ex-wives. Who can really know such torture but Larry King?

Since we live in a spiritually hostile world in which the aliens have taken over, it requires an act of conscious will to think properly. In other words, if one abandons oneself to the general intellectual ambience, there is virtually no chance of undeviated thinking. For obvious reasons, the situation is only worse for the tenured and for those who succumb to their influence.

In a way, the Pope is at a distinct advantage here, since he gets to live in the intensely sacred ambience of the Vatican, where one can hardly open one's eyes without being lifted by the vertical energies. Everything there points up, whereas in the world of the secular west, so much tends to point down. Thus for the rest of us, we must create our own interior cathedral, so to speak, or at least "recall" the archetype from which the physical one takes its measure.

This interior cathedral is where the soul finds its rest. Schuon speaks of "the humble serenity of pure intellection, humble because impersonal and serene because conforming to That which is."

Note that the impersonality assures, or at least promotes, the humility. For example, if I am saying something "new," not only is the focus inappropriately placed upon me, but I am probably wrong to boot: error squared. Intelligence without humility inevitably betrays itself, whereas humility is a kind of deep existential intelligence, if only the vivid awareness that one is not God (and dependent upon God for right thinking).

It is difficult to express it more clearly than this: "God requires from each man what each man can and must give; but from the intelligent man He also requires intelligence in the service of truth, for which it is made and through which it lives" (Schuon). And if one's intelligence is strictly in the service of truth, this is a kind of intellectual karma yoga, since one must constantly "forget the self" in order to be in conformity with the truth that transcends it.

And how can the ego get puffed up with pride, when there is no question of the ego inventing or possessing this truth? Of course it happens, but the moment it does, error has effaced the truth and introduces a kind of passional toxicity.

One intuits this in the case of all of those self-styled spiritual teachers who cannot but help promulgating deviant doctrines to their followers, since there is only one doctrine equally available to everyone, albeit in different modes for different spiritual types. Thus, the more necessary these teachers imagine themselves to be, the more unnecessary they actually are.

Schuon discusses the various spiritual types, which are classically divided into ruler, priest, sage, warrior, merchant, laborer and outcaste. Each can be sanctified in its own way save for the latter, which can only be saved.

Consider Schuon's description of the merchant caste, which includes the craftsman and farmer: there is a "love of work well done -- both the result and the performance -- and of wages honestly earned; an emotional accent on the fear of God and on meritorious works conscientiously and piously accomplished."

Please note that he is not being the least bit condescending. Imagine, for example, if American capitalism were dominated by this mentality -- which it actually is, far more than people realize. Indeed, this is why it "works," because of the American "civil religion" so accurately described by de Tocqueville.

My father was of this caste -- a very pure businessman. In this regard, it is impossible for me to imagine him engaging in any kind of unethical or dishonest business dealing, even though he was in no way conventionally religious. Nevertheless, one can see how his work was a kind of karma yoga, since it was always "elevating." And people loved doing business with him for it. Is living the truth not a kind of implicit knowing it? Or is it actually explicit?

Schuon goes on to say that such individuals can appear superficially "horizontal" and conventional, but there is nothing wrong with being conventional in a just and rightly ordered society. Indeed, it can be "a protection against the lack of a sense of proportion for those not sufficiently endowed with discernment."

For example, consider an Obama, who clearly imagines himself to be of the priestly/intellectual caste, but who is so lacking in humility -- not to mention discernment and conformity to the real -- that he falls far lower than any upstanding merchant in the Chamber of Commerce. It is no coincidence that he so contemptuously attacks the latter, just as he belittles all normal Americans and the civil religion that has served us so well.

We don't hate Obama. But he sure despises us. Intellectually speaking, the most meagerly endowed tea-partier knows more about America than Obama and his doubtcaste rabble of unrepentant dementors. And the former is certainly more spiritual, at least in the positive sense of the word.

Reminds me of that biblical story of how the productive builders were rejected by the stoner in chief...