Friday, December 02, 2011

Learn From the Experts How to Generate Your Own Demons!

Of the generation of demons, our unKnown Friend and psychopomp (BTW an odd-sounding word I didn't make up, and which means vertical tour guide or perhaps clinical pneumatologist) writes that they are a result of the cooperation of the male and female principles, or of perverse will and imagination: "a desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon."

If you peer at the card, you will notice that the demon is much larger than its parents. The parents gave birth to the demon, and yet, "have become enslaved by their own creation. They [the parents] represent perverse will and imagination contrary to nature, which have given birth to an androgynous demon, i.e., to a being endowed with desire and imagination, which dominates the forces that engendered it."

Look at the way government -- obviously man's creation -- grows and makes more demands of us, no matter who is in power. But that's how demons work -- again, refer to the picture above. The two little taxpayers are slaves of the government they created, run by those legions of androgynous castrati whom we cannot eradicate.

Now, what UF describes here will be familiar to parents out there, even if your child is not (always) a demon. For example, when a child is in the midst of a tantrum -- say, bellowing about "income inequality" at an OWS rally -- he is temporarily under the influence of a kind of demonic energy. It's not problematic unless the personality begins to crystalize around the axis of this energy, which can occur as a result of various environmental contingencies, e.g., spoiling, excess self-esteem, failure of gratitude, graduate school, etc.

Its opposite movement essentially falls under the heading of the "civilizing process," a process that has, over the past fifty years or so, fallen out of favor owing to the influence of the secular left. Conveniently, the left's practices produce uncivilized human beings (see European riots for details), while its philosophy forbids pointing this out. Instead of calling them "uncivilized" -- or, more to the point, barbarians -- we must call them "victims," or "disadvantaged," or "special," or some other misleading euphemism.

Several observations are in order regarding demon-detection, without which zeitgeist-busting is impossible. From 2 Corinthians we learn that the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. In other words, man is explicitly created with a spirit of freedom -- cf. the Declaration of Independence -- which you might say is the means to the end of our being, which is ultimately theosis, perfection, or God-realization. In short, the means: liberty. The ends: love, truth, beauty, unity (or the One).

This formula renders existence perfectly intelligible (over the long haul). Its denial renders existence perfectly absurd, although you may or may not know it, on account of your denial of Denial. But Ø x Ø is nevertheless Ø, no matter how you slice it; conversely, 〇 x anything is always everything, more on which as we proceed. Well, okay. Here's a hint, from Alfred North Whitehead:

"The creative principle is everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts.... Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine...."

"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet, waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."

I don't think I could come up with a better description of what I mean by 〇, in and with whom “we live and move and have our being" and "are also His offspring" (Acts 17:28). (Although that penultimate word, "hopeless," can be misinterpreted, for we always have vertical hope. We are only hopeless about the possibility of transforming earth into heaven, because the attempt to do so ushers in hell.)

Being that we are in the image of the Creator, human beings have no choice but to create. But what shall we create? More importantly, in what spirit shall we do so? Genuine creation should be liberating, expansive, elevating, radiating. But demonic creation will be the opposite: enslaving, constricting, enclosing, debasing. It always makes us smaller, not larger, does it knot?

In Schuon's metaphysics (which he felt to be universally valid), male is a reflection of the Absolute, female the Infinite. Perhaps the most destructive force on earth is the absolute will detached from the divine plane. This leads to the raw will to power and the absolute dictator, and to a cult that is always excessively male (one thinks of the homoeroticism of the Nazis).

On the other hand, the perverse imagination is well reflected in contemporary art and academia. For example, deconstruction is reminiscent of a weightless and mercurial female whose reality depends upon the mood she is in. There is no fixed, i.e., Absolute, center, or unmoved mover, since the Infinite has become divorced from the devalued Absolute: as the feminist cliche goes, "the Infinite needs the Absolute like a fish needs a bicycle." But once you detach language from the Logos, it becomes a kind of infinite nonsense generator -- the "infinite blather" of the tenured.

On the other end, once you detach the Absolute from the Infinite, it becomes a kind of soul-crushing ideology to which one must assent, as in 1984. (No, not the book. I mean when I was in graduate school.) It reminds us of Queeg and his jihad against conservatism, the latter of which is specifically a harmonious marriage of Absolute (or transcendence) and Infinite (or immanence).

Here is the irony: Queeg wishes to elevate Darwinian fundamentalism to the status of Absolute, which has the effect of denying the infinitude of Man's spirit. The result -- if you are intelligent enough to draw out the implications -- is that both science and Man become strictly impossible, in that they are detached from their very ground.

unKnown Friend next discusses the origins of the left in the false absolute of Marxism: "Engendered by the will of the masses through the generations, armed with a dummy intellectuality which is Hegel's dialectic misconstrued -- this spectre has grown and continues to make the rounds in Europe and in other continents..." Really? Who knew?

Here is where Marxism and Queegism converge, for with the former "there is no God or gods -- there are only 'demons' in the sense of creations of the human will and imagination." In other words, "Marxism" is simply an ideological superstructure produced by the will of the masses, which is in turn rooted in material economics and nothing more. Likewise, for the Darwnian fundamentalist, everything ultimately boils down to the selfish gene, or an absurdly absolute denial of the Infinite.

This creation of a false absolute is idol worship, pure and simple. And an idol is a wall from, in contrast to an icon, which is a window into, transcendence. Although man creates the idol, it appropriates power over man, walling him off from reality.

[W]hat terrible power resides in our will and imagination, and what responsibility it entails for those who unleash it into the world!... We people of the twentieth century know that the "great pests" of our time are the [artificially engendered demons], which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages. --MOTT

Despite all its setbacks, the six year struggle [of WWII], he went on, would one day go down in history as "the most glorious and valiant manifestation of a nation's will to existence." -- on Hitler's last will and testament, as related in Kershaw

There would, [Hitler] made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the "Church Question." "But it is clear," noted Goebbels, "that after the war it has to be generally solved... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and Germanic-heroic world-view." --ibid.

35 comments:

julie said...

We are only hopeless about the possibility of transforming earth into heaven, because the attempt to do so ushers in hell.

Yes, every time. The best we can do is work to transform ourselves (which is to say, allow grace to work within us) so that eventually, we may be worthy of heaven. In doing so, more often than not, the very place we are begins to resemble that place we most long to be. Even so, it can never be that place, a truth which one forgets at one's peril.

mushroom said...

I needed this one. I'll have to hit it again later after some assimilation. Thanks, Doc.

julie said...

Speaking of the generation of demons, single motherhood and OWS.

John Lien said...

Are demons completely man-made or do we just add to the population?

It really doesn't matter but, just curious.

Who's Queeg?

I'm also absorbing the Good/Creation/Order Evil/Entropy/Disorder concept.

I like the physics/metaphysics parallel.

So the heat death of the universe would be completely evil.

Let's check Wikipedia..

"in which the universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain motion or life. "

No energy freedom. Interesting.

Van Harvey said...

"Look at the way government -- obviously man's creation -- grows, no matter who is in power. But that's how demons work -- again, refer to the picture above. The two little taxpayers are slaves of the government they created, run by those legions of androgynous castrati."

First castrati: "What's for dinner?"
Second castrati: "Filet of taxpayer"
Both castrati: "Hmm mmm good!"

julie said...

@John, Queeg is what's-his-name, that guy who runs LGF. Or this guy.

mushroom said...

Queeg is Charles Johnson from Little Green Football who lost his mind trying to figure out who, if evolution is true, ate his strawberries.

That does fit in with mind parasites, doesn't it?

Julie, you should be flattered. All the smart people respect you, and I do, too.

I don't think the real OT means any harm, being, you know, a real neurotic woman of color and genius.

Or Lola.

mushroom said...

I type too slow.

John Lien said...

Thanks guys. I used to read LGF until I couldn't take the God hating anymore. Same reason I no longer go to REASON anymore even though the comments there were so much fun to read (until the God hatin' started up).

julie said...

Mushroom - :D

John, re. Reason, I feel the same way. There are some good articles there occasionally, and often food for thought even if I don't agree, but the comments got tiresome.

And Van, thanks.

Coming from all of you guys, in fact, I'm quite touched. Again, thank you.

mushroom said...

...a desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon...

I kept thinking this sounded like something else that I had heard of. Back twenty or twenty-five years ago, I ran across a really insightful teaching on "strongholds". Generally evangelicals do not believe that Christians can be demon-possessed (or even repossessed as the avatar -- Baptists pay their tithes just in case). However, most Christians are also aware that just adding water does not give you Instant Saint, and that a lot of us (Herman) struggle with habits and thought patterns that are not pretty more than we would care to admit.

After I went back and found some of my old notes, I realized that the creation of a "stronghold" is exactly the pattern described -- perverse desire impregnating the imagination.

The idea of a stronghold is pictured as a fortification created by disobedience and willfulness from which a demon is able to attack and harass the Christian. But what MOTT is saying is closer to the truth. And if you think about it, the demon in the picture has a "strong hold" on the will and imagination.

Seems to me like pretty cool c00nvergence.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Hi Julie!

Just wanna say you always give me food for thought with your Juleservations. :^)

OT is playing it's passive/aggressive game again, and frankly, it's personal questions are creepy and akin to a stalker personality.

In it's anger it reveals a bit more of it's true nature which is naturally repulsive.

Cousin Dupree said...

We usually delete his inane comments as soon as we become aware of them, but that's more difficult to do once people respond to him, because then one has to wipe out a whole thread -- which we are more than happy to do, except one doesn't want to give offense to the innocent.

Gagdad Bob said...

In case I don't get around to blogging about it, a good quote from The One and the Many, on the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida:

"[T]he primary relationship in Kitaro's philosophy is not the I-Thou relationship between human beings as advanced by Buber, but the relationship between the finite self and Absolute Nothingness which then results in the religious conversion of the self-centered I into a non-I."

This sounds very much like what we call O-->(¶), subsequent to the "conversion" of (•) to (¶).

(BTW, nice pneumagraph of O on the cover of cover of this book.)

Gagdad Bob said...

Very interesting. From what I can gather so far, Kitaro's philosophy may be summarized as:



(↓↑)

ʘ

i.e., the Concrete Universal manifesting in something like the "abstract particular" individual. But he seems to regard the dynamic (↓↑) linking the terms as the primordial reality.... intriguing....

julie said...

From your first comment, I was going to say Nishida sounds reminiscent of Eckhart, but the emphasis on (↓↑) is different. Like saying (in other words) that love or grace or communion is the realest reality.

Intriguing, indeed...

Gagdad Bob said...

Very compatible with Zizioulas' Being and Communion, discussed earlier this year....

julie said...

I haven't read that one yet, but it's on my ever-growing list.

OT, Vanderleun keeps posting this at his various sites, but it cracks me up every time.

Van Harvey said...

Gagdad said "But he seems to regard the dynamic (↓↑) linking the terms as the primordial reality.... intriguing.... "

Or put into geekspeak:

In relational databases, information is separated into tables of like data for storage - an Address table will have address number, street, city, etc, a Person table has firstname, lastname, hundredsofthousandsofdollarsofdebtowedonbirth (just kidding. I wish), etc. The tables are then related to eachother by uniqeID's which appear in each tables records (line), like VH1.

That enables an enormous amount of data to be stored into less space... but each table’s data is useless, meaningless, worthless, without its relationships to other tables.

There is NO information, without the relationships, and only in and through the relationships does the data get 'resurrected' into information and become meaningful.

Whenever someone brings me a problem, before they tell me much about it, I want to see their tablemap – the structure of their tables and the map of their relations – before anything else. You can’t imagine the chaos caused by poorly structured tables and bad relationships.

Thus speaketh the Tao of DAO (data access objects)

;-)

Van Harvey said...

Attention Skully - this wv was meant for you.

wv:grogg

Gagdad Bob said...

Van -- that is also very intriguing. Being digitally illiterate and all, I can't even deal with the difference between staring at a CD vs. listening to it -- i.e., how this static data in a piece of matter becomes lived experience in the soul. The boy was asking me about it last night. All I could say was, "that's a good question. I was hoping you could explain it to me in a another ten years or so."

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Thanks Julie, that is a hilarious pic! LOLOL!

"We're gonna need a shitload more scrolls."

:^)

Skully said...

WV likes me Mister Van.

Last year I received a grog of the month gift from WV.

Perhaps I'll get a grogg of the month gift now? Any takers?

The extra g in grogg is the super natural element.
Bob is always talkin' about this with his symbols 'n math 'n shit.
1 + 1 = 3. Or, as I like to say a bakers couple.
Better yet, a brewers couple. More brew for your buck!

Hmmm...now I'm thirsty. Time for my mornin' grogg.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

That's a good analogy Van!

Are we digital or anologue? CD or vinyl? Lager or ale?

Of course, what we do know is that the trolls are mono and full of static static.

I prefer the crisp, clean sound of Raccoonstereosoundaround myself.
It's like live all the time because it is!

Magnus Itland said...

I seem to recall Rabbi Steinsaltz implying that demons, once created, necessarily must pay back their energy. If this happens post mortem, it could take substantially more time and effort than now and be far more unpleasant. Is this correctly understood?

It reminds me of the idea of purgatory. In Dante's world, the demons were personal and largely confined to Hell, whereas the sufferings of Purgatory were impersonal. I am not sure things are that clearcut. Even in this life, we generate pointless suffering, as thoroughly documented by the Buddha et al, and it is generally not personal until we project it on some hapless bystander.

Reeking Trench Warfare said...

RG has asked you not to respond to my questions.

Will you obey?

Did you know the crime rate is lower than the US in many Arab countries?

Yasser said...

Unfortunately, there's nothing here for us to steal except the foreign aid they send us.

Yusuf said...

I once stole a kiss from a goat.

Hasaan said...

Not only do we have less crime, but you disgusting Christians criminalize normal behavior such as killing your daughter for disobedience.

Muhammed #346,541 said...

Actually, we don't know anything about this stimulating conversation, since we're not allowed free access to the internet. Ironically, I am not typing this.

Mohamet said...

We have a hard-line stance on rape, though. When a woman gets raped, that whore better marry the guy or go to jail. Now in some places, she'd just be stoned to death for having irresistibly seductive exposed eyes, but we're coming around in some places. Life in prison should be penalty enough.

Wali said...

And the reason we are permitted four wives is because you never know what kind of beast might be lurking under the bag! Imagine choosing the gal beneath bag #1, only to find out that she's a 300 lb. heffa' with a lazy eye, missing teeth, and monobrow. It's only fair.

Wali said...

BTW, just what crime did this Jerry Sandusky commit? What normal redblooded man isn't attracted to the pert buttocks of a fair youth? You Americans just hate Muslim culture, that's all.

Baghdad Bob said...

There is no crime in Iraq. None. Now that the Zionist occupiers are leaving.

ge said...

Dead of Night Drudge headline:
"Woman slams dead raccoon against VT city building..."

Frustrated troll hijinx?

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