On Becoming a Simple-Minded Heavyweight

Continuing with yesterday's post, if we could ascribe a "shape" to man, it would be a kind of inward spiral. Purcell says much the same thing; beginning with the ancient Greeks, "we make our own self the object of a quest," and this "odyssey within and beyond ourselves is a lifelong one, with the quest itself leading to a substantial deepening of who we are."

And substantial is the operative word, because it does indeed result in a kind of existential "heft" that is quite palpable when we encounter it, and more or less synonymous with (or even the measure of) real depth.

Conversely, we all know "lightweights" of various kinds -- intellectual, emotional, spiritual, artistic, political, ethical, etc. We routinely deal with so-called intellectuals who have no heft whatsoever, the types who generally compose our media and academic elite. The illusory weight they throw around results from mutual mirroring, or, to use the technical term, transactional fellatio.

As I've mentioned before -- and I'm not even sure how this works -- you can usually tell when you are dealing with one of these lightweights within a death sentence or two of their writing (following the Church of the SubGenius, I call it picking up someone's soul-stench, but you can call it what you want; perhaps "minus ≈" would be a good pneumaticon, in contrast to the resonant ≈ of the genuine saint, sage, or artist).

How are such persons able to instantaneously transmit so little with so little? Obama comes to mind. Probably because of the upward winds of affirmative action -- a perverse caricature of the inspiraling process -- he has never come close to discovering his own vacuity.

Which would also explain the absence of irony, wit, or self-awareness generally. And the nastiness, of course, since anyone who dares to notice the new emperor's empty suit is targeted as an Enemy of the People. The Democrat war on men never ends.

It's quite a nice little racket one has, when accurate perception of oneself is immediately transformed to racism (or sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and all the rest).

This would be an example of a collective defense mechanism protecting a cultural mind parasite; it results in a kind of impermeable barrier to truth, and greatly impedes the progress of the groups who engage in it. It is hardly a coincidence that blacks have been the most damaged by Obama's policies, and yet, continue to support him, similar to how abused children will vociferously defend their parents.

Back to the inspiraling process as the shape of human existence, Schuon -- who is the opposite of the existentially heftless, since he communicates substantiality with striking economy -- agrees that

"The way towards God always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration [read: heft], from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

This serenity is not a "blandness," which is what I imagined it must be when I lived at the periphery, where "excitement" is really just restlessness and agitation in disguise.

Rather, "In order to be happy, man must have a center; now this center is above all the Certitude of the One. The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery. To be a man is to be at the Center; it is to be Center" (Schuon).

I know what you're thinking: how does this differ, say, from the alarmingly egocentric Obama, for whom delusions of adequacy would be a great improvement? We can illuminate the difference quite easily with just three words: attractor, ego, and O.

As we have discussed in the past, there is clearly (for anyone can phenomenologically prove it to himself) something analogous to "gravity" -- or gravitational force -- in psychospiritual space. Just as, say, the moon is drawn into the orbit of the earth-attractor, and earth into the sun-attractor, vertical space is populated with a host of transpersonal attractors, to such an extent that it can truly be said that "you are what (or Whom) you orbit."

The very first step of the spiritual life -- for all subsequent steps follow from it -- is to leave one attractor for another. Call it what you will -- from the outer to inner, periphery to center, ego to nous, or just (•) to (¶), this is in a sense our "perpetual practice," in which we are always beginners, because we are always taking that first booby step over and over.

And why do we have to keep taking the first step? Because taking it by no means eliminates all the other attractors. There is still a fallen world, there are still seductive lies, there is still our own dubious nature capable of self-deception and ocular auto-pullwoolery.

Schuon raises a subtle but orthoparadoxical point, to the effect that there is a kind of good and bad movement at both the periphery and center. On the one hand, the "spiritual immobility" of the infinite Center is "opposed to the endless movement of external phenomena." But on the other hand, there is a kind of higher "spiritual movement" which "is opposed to the natural inertia of the fallen soul."

To put it in plain language, the people whose lives seem so full of activity are often the most static, whereas the Raccoon is never moving more swiftly than when he is just sitting still, say, banging out a blog post. No one could look at me at the moment and know that I am soaring on wings of slack, least of all my son, who is eager for me to play with him because he is bored sitting still (it's Easter vacation).

In his case the boredom is a good thing, because it means that he cannot be satisfied with the faux movement provided by the TV. For young children -- especially boys -- because their hardware is still being assembled and coming on line, they need external movement to feed the inspiraling process. For man -- chronologically, ontologically, and collectively -- discovery of the outer precedes discovery of the inner.

Here is another apt observation by Schuon:

"The soul must withdraw itself from the dispersion of the world; this is the quality of Inwardness. Then the will must vanquish the passivity of life; this is the quality of Actuality. Finally, the mind must transcend the unconsciousness of the ego; this is the quality of Simplicity. To perceive the Substance intellectually, above the uproar of accidents, this is to realize Simplicity. To be one is to be simple; for Simplicity is to the One what Inwardness is to the Center and what Actuality is to the Present."

Gotta run, but to summarize: Inwardness, Actuality, Simplicity, Present, and Center = heft. Don't worry, you'll see it when you know it.

(All the Schuon references are from his extremely pithy and yet weighty Echoes of Perennial Wisdom)