When Your Outside is In and Your Inside is Out

Following up with yesterday's post, it reminds me of what the Raccoon Fathers used to say: if a miracle can happen in your head, of all places, then one can happen anywhere. But since man specializes in transforming the miraculous into the mundane, he ends up with the opposite: as above, so below, and as inside, so outside. In other words, the vertical is first flattened and then projected, so man is imprisoned in his own mayateriality.

Therefore, if your inside is, say, quantitative, or hysterical, or predictable, or liberal, don't be surprised if your outside is too. Likewise, if you don't acknowledge God, don't be surprised if he doesn't acknowledge you. I can understand being stupid, but why be so proud of it? Then your stupidity goes from being treatable to fatal.

Look at Obama, trying to blame the riots (the exterior) on "Republicans" (the obsessively hated fantasy object of his impoverished interior life). I don't know if it's fatal stupidity or fatal cynicism, but either way, it renders him dead from the neck up and the skull in. And it just reinforces the pathological mindset of such baltimorons, who will do whatever liberals tell them -- implicitly or explicitly -- to do.

Odd that the soulless Obama should tell us we need to do some soul searching. And when I say "soulless," I am again referring to his turning his world inside out and then calling his crystalized delusions "reality." But this is what liberals do. Which I wouldn't mind if they didn't try to force the rest of us to live amidst their ruinous delusions and negotiate through their nasty psychopolitical dreamscape.

Hmm. I wonder if I'm already falling under the influence of Henry Corbin, about whom I am reading a book called World Turned Inside Out? He was a Sufi mystic and scholar, but -- similar to Schuon -- much more than that.

From what I've read thus far, he's uncategorizable, and apparently, often incomprehensible. I don't yet know what to think -- for which reason I have removed him from the sidebar list of coming attractors -- and yet, there is much that is ringing the old interior bell.

In fact, when the bell rings, it is often because the thought occurs to me: "Aha! So this is what I've been doing for the past two decades! Or maybe Corbin was just doing what I am doing, but calling it something else. In other words, maybe he's a Raccoon and not a Sufi.

Than again, as Schuon says, maybe you need the clothing -- the exterior form -- to manifest the formless, just as, say, in the pathological sense, the liberal needs angry and miserable rioters in order to manifest and justify his liberalism. Likewise, no one needs racism more than the race pimps of the left, just as no one needs "rape culture" more than shrill and unattractive women.

Hold on, sharp turn. What is the liberal projecting -- what is he seeing -- when he hallucinates this thing called "homosexual marriage," a thing which has never existed and which cannot exist? This is not a knock on homosexuals, mind you. They exist, to be sure, and for more reasons than one. It is just that they cannot enter a state of marriage. They can no doubt enter other states, and I will even stipulate that they can enter states from which heterosexuals are excluded. But why pretend they are the same?

As it so happens, our next chapter in Schindler is on the subject of theology, gender, and the future or western civilization. For if civilization is the exteriorization of an interior, then we've already lost it, for it is just a matter of time before the exterior matches the interior of perhaps the most spiritually impoverished generation(s) in American history. Millennials are poised to impose the benefits of their abject spiritual vacuity on the rest of us by overturning the order of the trimodal soul.

For this question "cut(s) to the very heart of Christian faith and to the very foundations of human civilization." Note again that the civilization we have built -- the exterior -- is only the projection of an interior. This naturally involves the meaning of gender, "for gender implicates... our basic view of the world (ontology), and indeed our entire way of life (spirituality)."

Ironic, isn't it, that the left treats gender as the Most Important Thing In The World (along with race), and yet, utterly trivializes it. We agree on the importance, except the importance is a consequence of anterior principles as opposed to posterior ideology.

As we have discussed in the past, God creates human beings in his image, and (therefore) simultaneously male-and-female. Male-and-female "is" the (or an) image of God; in particular it is an icon of the Trinity, which redounds to the sanctity of marriage -- the very sanctity homosexuals wish to misappropriate.

Sanctity involves a flow of energies from one world to the next -- like the sunrise discussed in yesterday's post, someone has to be there to receive it. Any sacrament is like a window, or a transparency, between this world and the one(s) above.

Just as God's radical relativity (i.e., his tripersonal life) is not a deficit but a perfection, "the gender difference is thus a perfection, and this perfection is somehow inscribed in the very being of man and woman as created."

Deny this ontological fact, and you are setting yourself up for misery, because it is miserable to live at odds with reality. You will either be miserable, like a self-disempowered liberal, or create misery, like a liberal with power.

I don't know, perhaps "tradition" is partly to blame for regarding the feminine as some sort of deficit, or like "masculinity minus x." However, I think it is more due to fallen human nature, which infects everything, including religion. But it is also partly due to the exigencies of human development, in which the male, in order to be one, must declare his independence from Mother, even while having to return to the realm of the feminine in order to find mature love. There are glandmines everywhere!

As a consequence, the subterranean world of Mother Love can be more or less conflated with the realm of Sexual Love, resulting in a whole rainbow of pathology. Back before it was against the law to say so, homosexual impulses could often be illuminated in this developmental context. I mean, if heterosexuals can be sexually neurotic, why can't homosexuals be? Duh! For the same reason blacks can't be racist.

In reality, both masculinity and femininity are "perfections" in the platonic sense. When we tell a boy to "be a man," we mean that quite literally. And when we tell a woman to act like one, we are not being figurative, let alone sexist.

And critically, male and female can only achieve their perfection in union with each other (we will leave to the side people who for one reason or another are "solitaries" and who must achieve this same union on an interior basis). This goes to John Paul II's theology of the gift, whereby "love in all of its purity is not only a pouring forth but a receiving and giving back," in a metacosmic spiral of exteriorization and interiorization.

We could say that this goes to receptivity (feminine) and activity (masculine), so long as we stipulate that (as alluded to in yesterday's post) there is an active passivity at one end, and receptive activity at the other, and that these always interpenetrate; like the Trinity, they can be separated but not divided, or they could never be brought together. In other words, there is a deep interior unity beneath the fruitful and generative "polarity," symbolized of course by the (divine) child.

Note that there is nothing "passive" about the Son, even though (or especially because) he is the quintessence of receptivity. Furthermore, "the Father, who allows himself to be conditioned in return in his begetting and spirating, himself has a (supra-)feminine dimension."

Therefore, "God, precisely in the 'masculine' activity whereby he creates the world, allows himself to be 'affected by' the world; and he remains present within the world he creates. It is for this reason that Balthasar says that 'God's relation to the world is not only masculine... but womb-like and feminine...'" There is a fullness of both generativity and receptivity, and if it's good enough for them three, it should be good enough for us.