Obama the Blightbringer

About the satan business alluded to in yesterday's post: I don't care what anyone says, but there is without question an anti-divine force or energy in the world. You can personify it if you like in the form of Satan, but that's not strictly necessary.

Analogously, long before Newton came along, people had had abundant experience with the force of gravity, even if they were way off about how it actually worked.

Indeed, even now we can only pretend to know how it really works, but this detracts not one bit from the fact that we all have first hand experience of it.

I like Schuon's distinction between the satanic and the luciferic: the latter is more passively dark while the former is actively and aggressively anti-light. Thus, most typical liberals are merely luciferic (and usually with no conscious intention of wanting to be), while doctrinaire leftists are actively demonic, hostile to the light.

I don't often read David Horowitz because he's too glum and depressing -- the temperamental opposite of the Happy Warrior -- but his Black Books of the American Left and of Progressivism are state of the art indictments of the dark political magic of the Nemesis or of the Hostile Forces, whichever you prefer.

The conservative temperament -- irrespective of particular beliefs -- tends to identify the locus of control within, while leftists overwhelmingly externalize control, which is to say, feel powerless over their lives. They then make the delusion come true by empowering the state to diminish our liberty and personal autonomy. In other words, they force external reality to comport to their feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and dependency, thereby normalizing what is humanly abnormal.

Which is why, to reiterate what was said in yesterday's post, the Hostile Forces are like a kind of gravitational attraction that pulls our "most central faculties into the outer part of the soul," with the result that they are imprisoned "in attachment to the counterfeit objects which he [the Evil One] has forged for their perception."

This is indeed one of the Critical Principles upon which your whole life hinges: will you turn down and out, toward the world, or up and in, toward the Light? This is the fork in the ontological road confronting us at each and every moment, allowing us to reenact or resist the Fall, depending.

Again, think of gravity, or of two massive objects pulling us in different directions. To extend the analogy, one is a bright star, the other a black hole.

This also answers the perennial question of why man -- mankind -- is such an assoul. It is specifically because man is the highest of all creatures. But because his lofty faculties can be pulled one way or the other, it means they can be captured and corrupted. As alluded to in yesterday's post -- and this is another important principle -- the corruption of best is the worst.

Example? Too numerous. But just consider how the left infiltrates every good and decent institution or tradition and corrupts it from within, from marriage, to the Boy Scouts, to higher and lower education, to the Constitution, to the military, you name it, they deploy their higher faculties in the service of darkness.

As Lings expresses it, "just as man who was the highest of all earthly things becomes in his degeneration the lowest," so the "faculties which were the most precious elements in his soul become the source of all its subsequent disorder..." Intelligence gone bad is the problem of Our Time.

Let us reluctantly stupulate that Obama is a really smart guy instead of the affirmative action mediocrity he is. Just what has he done with this brilliant intellect? Before he became president, thankfully, nothing. But once he gained real power, he was able to transition from mere darkness to real hostility to the Light. "Lightbringer" indeed. More like blightbringer.

In order to further our understanding of this process, we need to bring in the Horizontal and the Vertical. Religion has to do with vertical remembrance, not just of doctrine per se, but of verticality as such.

In other words, doctrine doesn't just resonate with inner truth, but also serves to strengthen and vivify the "rememberer" -- which is why we call it verticalisthenics. For me, blogging is my daily verticalisthenic exercise. And it is aerobic as well, since this involves breathing in the spirit, or pneuma.

This vertical remembrance also tends to pull us away from the "world," not in its created reality, but in its delusional collective appearance. The world is still big. It's the people that got smaller.

As Lings reminds us, "the least particle of certainty that can be had about the next world must necessarily have come down from above..." It is through this that we are drawn "from the outer part of the soul to its centre, where the vertical is to be found in all its fullness..."

At the very least, this vertical dimension has four main divisions; let us call them the worldly/terrestrial/material; second, the psychic/intellectual/rational; third, the celestial/heavenly; and fourth, the unmanifest, the ground, the ultimate source of Slack.

And remember, this hierarchy can in no way be understood from the bottom up, a la the absaridity of desiccated scientism. Rather, it is a projection from the top down, which is precisely why each level has traces or "memories" of the one immediately above.

"This dimension is in the nature of things: like a star that falls from the sky, every Revelation leaves behind it a luminous trail of higher truths."

Now, the world, being created, is a nonstop revelator ride. In order to prove this to yourself, just look at all those luminous trails -- trails of truth and beauty -- leading up and out.